My favorite films of 2024

25 films that reminded me that cinema around the world is running strong.

This is the second entry of my favorites, after I published my favorite music on the 2nd. My favorite books will be published next week.

I love cinema and, since the pandemic, I have intensified my film watching, for both professional and personal reasons. I make an intense effort to watch whatever decent is shown in St. Louis cinemas (which gets a good bit of movies but nothing close to what would be available in Mexico City or New York), I subscribe to 19 streaming platforms and I continue to collect discs. As a result, I think I have as much of a broad view of films coming out, at least as much as one can have access as a civilian who does not work as a journalist or a festival programmer.

In 2024, I watched 288 films, not counting any rewatch or any film I watch for research or teaching. Of these, roughly 150 meet the conditions I put in place for the list. The list consists of my 25 favorite films that I watched for the first time in 2024, released between 2023 and 2024 in a way accessible to me—which means for example, that a 2022 film. may not have actually been released commercially until this year. Setting 25 was very difficult, as this list started with 50 films and I had to make decisions to avoid excessive sprawl. Some of them are mentioned in the discussion below.

I do not include classics or older movies, all films are from the 2020s. I will mark my top five films with an asterisk, and follow the list with commentary for those interested. The films of this list, on average, are significantly better than the ones last year. To encourage people to watch them, I annotated where they can be seen. Most of the ones available on streaming can also be rented in VOD platforms.

The list will miss films that may be in some of the best lists of 2024 from other people and from magazines, but that I in fact watched in 2023. The two notable films in this regard are La Chimera and Perfect Days, which were in my year from last year. since I saw them prior to their broad release. Conversely, some films I could not see for last year’s list have made the 2024 list because they finally became broadly available. And, of course, there are some films that could presumably been contenders in my list, but are not yet available to me. These include Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, No Other Land, The Brutalist and The Secret of the Sacred Fig, which may turn out to be in next year’s list.

My Favorite Films of 2025 are:

1. Levan Akin. Crossing. In MUBI

2. Kamal Aljafari. A Fadia Film. No formal US distribution, in festivals.

3. Betrand Bonello. The Beast. In the Criterion channel. *

4. Jayro Bustamante. Rita. In AMC+ and Shudder.

5. Nuri Bilge Ceylan. About Dry Grasses. In the Criterion Channel.

6. Laura Citarella. Trenque Lauquen. In the Criterion Channel. See also the short the Miu Miu Affaire in MUBI, shot in the same town. *

7. Vera Drew. The People’s Joker. In MUBI.

8. Victor Erice. Close your Eyes. In VOD Rental.*

9. Coralie Fargeat. The Substance. In MUBI

10. Felipe Gálvez. The Settlers. In MUBI.

11. Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Evil Does Not exist. In the Criterion Channel *

12. Tran Anh Hung. The Taste of Things. In Hulu and AMC+

13. Radu Jude. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. In MUBI.

14. Payal Kapadia. All We Imagine as Light. In theaters.

15. Hirokazu Kore-Eda. Monster. In MUBI.

16. Rachel Lambert. Sometimes I think about dying. In MUBI. *

17. George Miller. Furiosa and Furiosa Black and Chrome Edition. The regular film in Max and Netflix. The Black and Chrome only in VOD or disc.

18. Cristian Mungiu. R.M.N. In Hulu and AMC+.

19. CJ “Fiery” Obasi. Mami Wata. In MUBI.

20. Pham Tien An. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. In the Kino Film Collection.

21. Pascal Plante. Red Rooms. In VOD Rental

22. Angela Schanelec. Music. In VOD Rental.

23. Jane Schoebrun. I Saw the TV Glow. In Max.

24. Wim Wenders. Anselm. In the Criterion Channel (the 3D is available in Criterion Disc for those who have the equipment for it).

25. Takashi Yamazaki. Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla minus one minus color. Both in Netflix.

I do not know that my favorite films are “the best,” but they definitely stayed with me. Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast has its flaws, but is also beautiful, bold and moving. One of the best adaptations ever of Henry James, but more significantly a great film with a reincarnation premise that in lesser hands would have been a really bad movie. Instead, it’s a film with three different, well-delivered, aesthetic canvases, and what may be Léa Seydoux’s best performance ever. A close second is Victor Erice’s Close your Eyes, a true masterpiece about the question of unfinished art and the aging artist. I thought I was not going to be able to see it in a screen, but ultimately it was picked up for distribution and not only did it miraculously open in St. Louis, but a Blu-Ray version is about to be released. It is a truly perfect film.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car was my hands-down favorite film of 2022, and his new one, Evil Does Not Exist, does not disappoint. It is a much different film: a more abstract take on the problems of extractivism and the capitalist destruction of live environments and traditional communities. While Drive My Car, and Hamaguchi’s prior films in general, are deeply invested in personal and love relationships between character, this film is an ode to the relationship between humans and nature.

From Latin American Cinema, my fourth favorite film is Trenque Lauquen. Not for the faint of heart at a 4:20 minute mark, but yet not as demanding as La Flor, the other major film of Pampero Cine. It is two sequenced movies on the same story, with generic and formal shifts. Slow but very compelling and fascinating. The best Latin American film of the decade so far, hands down.

I also recommend Jayro Bustamante’s Rita, which is unfortunately buried in AMC+ and Shudder, platform with very few subscribers. It is a fictionalization of a horrific case of abuse of minors in government-run shelters for at-risk young girls, in Guatemala formally structured like a very dark fairy tale, in ways that will remind some of Pan’s Labyrinth. Go out of your way to watch it, it is the best film of a director whose every film is extraordinary. The other truly amazing Latin American film I saw this year was Felipe Gálvez’s The Settlers, a Neo-Western on the ethnic cleansing of southern Chile in the early 20th century. The film is precise and intense, and has a truly amazing soundtrack.

There are a few films that I really enjoyed but I do not think of as favorites, including Lisandro Alonso’s ambitious Eureka, which is brilliant but also punishing to watch. Rodrigo Moreno’s Los Delincuentes is aesthetically excellent but also an hour too long. Martin Rejtman’s The Practice is a very enjoyable deadpan comedy (on yoga no less), but not as good as his early 2000s films. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts is a fantastic film essay but not as strong as his great fiction films. Maité Alberdi’s In Her Place is very endearing and fun, but also fairly conventional and not as interesting as her documentaries.

The list includes no Mexican films. This is in part a matter of availability, distribution was much worse than last year. But the ones who did get distributed would not even enter a favorite list. Sujo, which is getting a lot of praise has virtues, including quality visual and aural work and an intelligent representation that avoids the mythification of the narcos. But it also fails in its attempt at representing the young sicario at the center of it with dignity, by falling into a cheesy and saviorist narrative in the second half. Pedro Páramo is beautiful to see but very flat. The better Mexican movie I saw this year is Iván Löwenberg’s No quiero ser polvo, a film on a woman joining a cult bracing for an impending apocalypse, that actually resolves itself intelligently, and surprisingly. I really recommend it, but it has no US distribution that I know of. I also liked, as a guilty pleasure, El sabor de la Navidad, a Mexican answer to the Hallmark Christmas movie available in Vix with subtitles. Not a great film, but honestly more successful that the more prestigious films. But, honestly, I have seen very little because few worthwhile films have popped up in US platforms.

Regarding US film, there were many in the bottom half of my list of fifty, mostly because I went to the theater a lot. It was for the most part a mediocre year, with good movies but nothing to match what was coming from the rest of the world. My fifth favorite film is from the US though: Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying, probably the best film I have ever seen about loneliness and alienation. It is beautifully shot, with some truly virtuoso frames, and Daisy Ridley delivers the performance of her life: contained yet intense, tragic and funny, compassionate and painful. Some may tell me I am overrating it, but I found it to be deeply affecting. Is is the best US film of the year? no. But I wish the US made more films at this scale.

Beyond this, I did like a few US films and I do not want to be facetious about them, because they are very good. Sean Baker, notwithstanding all the accusations he gets of being problematic, is a damn brilliant filmmaker, and I have loved everything he has done. Anora is no exception, probably the best US film of the year in terms of technical merits. I hope it gets the Oscar, but I think the low-key backlash the movie is getting may detract from that. Longlegs almost made it to this list, because it is great, but in the end I went with a bit more aestheticist selection. I also really liked Smile 2, a quality franchise film that ties horror with mental illness in a very effective way. Having said this, in the commercial film space there are also really overrated films, like Challengers, which can only be considered transgressive in a moment of deep conservatism. The same can be said of Babygirl, although it was very good in comparison. And Megalopolis was an unwatchable film to me, and I really do not understand why people say they like it other than recognizing an ambition that US films for adult has lost.

In the blockbuster realm, I loved Furiosa, and I am very sad it did not do as well as it needed to be to get another film in the Mad Max saga. People missed Charlize Theron, but I also think it is a tic from the MCU distortions in audiences’ brains to expect films to be copies of the predecessor. Furiosa is a very distinct film within the same world and I think it was unfairly underrated. I recommend watching it in the Black and Chrome Edition.

My favorite blockbuster was Godzilla Minus One, both in color and in the “minus color edition.” It does with a fifteen million dollar budget what the Universal monsters franchise cannot do with twenty times the budget: a terrifying monster, and engaging story, and an entry in the franchise that is both original and faithful. It is a real masterpiece.

A theme obvious to me and very reflected in my list is the representation of trans people in cinema, which has produced some of the very best films of the year. My two other favorite US films fall in this category. I Saw the TV Glow is an amazing genre film, but more notably the best film I have ever seen to engage dysphoria in a figurative way. Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, nearly censored for copyright claims and ultimately picked up by the great LBTTQIA+ distributor Altered Innocence, is DIY guerrilla filmmaking at its very, very best. Fresh, and original and something I did not think was possible to make in the US anymore. From a different corner of the world, Levan Akin’s Crossing is a beautiful, aching film about what is lost when we cast people out of our families and communities. I would be remiss not to mention Paul Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography, another excellent film essay that I think got eclipsed for me by Vera Drew, but nonetheless very worthwhile.

There is also the question of Emilia Pérez. My opinion is this: I loved it as a film, I think that it is very good formally and also a very good mise-en-scène of the limits of representation of the narco. At the same time, it does beckon a realistic reading on both the trans character and the violence in Mexico and at that level it is deeply problematic. To me, it is a film that, like other, better Audiard’s films, requires us to resist the realist documentary reading to fully appreciate it. And some people, for good reasons, just cannot get over that. I am writing an essay in Spanish on the film. But if I had not seen such good films the last two weeks of the year, Emilia Pérez would have been in the top 25. Given all the awards and the backlash, I think it will be a film worth discussing for a long time.

Beyond this, I hope readers of this post will explore the rest of the entries. They are all great films. Music is one of the most incredible, complex films of the year. Anselm is an amazing documentary, particularly in 3D. Mami Wata is the most visually beautiful film in this list. About Dry Grasses and Monster show their master directors at the top of their game. All We Imagine as Light is a great film about cities and migrants. R.M.N. is the most intelligent depiction I have seen about the rise of anti-immigrant fascism from the structures of everyday life in precarious capitalism. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is a real riot. The Substance is bold and great, and Demi Moore is amazing. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is demanding and meandering, but also a true masterpiece on loss. The Taste of Things is a great food film, and a deeply romantic film and Juliette Binoche is simply exquisite in it.

To close I do want to highlight the two films that surprised me the most. A Fidai Film, I stumbled into it when I found it in an online festival and it is a masterpiece, an experimental film on the looting of Palestinian archives and the loss of memory. A tough, demanding watch and not for broad audiences, but powerful and rewarding.

The other one is Red Rooms. I won’t spoil it, but I went to see it without knowing what it was and it kept me on the edge of my seat for the whole running time.

Thank you for reading. books are coming next Tuesday.