This has been a difficult year. You may have been buffeted by anger you didn’t want to feel, and didn’t know how to productively process. Breeding grounds for misinformation—and its even more treacherous sibling, disinformation—have proliferated. AI is coming, supposedly to make our lives easier, but in reality it may just be taking our jobs. Sometimes it has seemed that soullessness has become the order of the day—as if having a soul were simply too much bother.
But as of right now, at least, most movies are made by human beings, and they are still one of the most extraordinary ways for humans to talk to one another. The conversation may seem one-sided. After all, a filmmaker makes the movie, and then you buy the ticket or pay to stream it. But if you care about movies at all, then surely there have been times you’ve gone so deep into a film that you’ve almost taken up residence within it—or, rather, it has taken up residence within you. This is why filmmakers do what they do. Some are deeply invested in capturing the texture of life that surrounds them, so that viewers in California or Iowa or New York will have some sense, say, of what it’s like to be a woman making her way alone in a densely populated, noisy, complicated city like Mumbai. For a filmmaker, even just asking the question, “What do women want?” can yield rich, pleasurable rewards. Asking what women need is even more dangerous. Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof has risked his life to do so; you can’t put more faith in the art form than that.
Making a film is more of a crapshoot than ever, especially if you’re hoping your work will be watched in theaters, on the big screen, rather than at home on the small one. But sometimes watching movies small is a necessity: unless you live within driving distance of a good art-house theater, some of the best movies of 2024 might not have come to a cinema near you. The 10 titles I share with you here are movies that have helped me through this fraught and sometimes confounding year. I hope you’ll find your way to at least some of them—and perhaps one or two or more of them will find a home in you.
10. DogMan
French filmmaker Luc Besson has long specialized in fantastic flights of fantasy and shockeroo violence. But he’s never made a film as tender as DogMan. Caleb Landry Jones’ Douglas is a wounded human being, a survivor of childhood abuse, who finds solace in living with his community of dogs. DogMan is about the families we choose, sometimes more sustaining than the ones we’re born into. It’s also the perfect movie for those days you’re convinced that dogs are better than people—even if that’s every day.
9. Flow
This wordless animated wonder from Latvia, directed by Gints Zilbalodis, follows a nameless cat as he travels across a flooded world, in a boat shared by a clumsy-friendly dog, an opportunistic lemur, and a stately, long-legged secretary bird. Elegant and spare, this is an environmental parable that doesn’t hammer away at its message. Instead, it gently reminds us that the beauty of this world is worth preserving.
8. Emilia Pérez
In Jacques Audiard’s extravagantly emotional opera Emilia Pérez, Zoe Saldaña plays Rita, a disillusioned lawyer working in Mexico, who’s asked to undertake a strange task: a ruthless drug lord, Manitas, wants to transition to living as a woman and needs Rita to arrange both his surgery and subsequent disappearance. She pulls it off, and thinks she’s through with the job. But the woman Manitas has become, now named Emilia Pérez (both roles are played by the fantastic Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón), re-emerges, asking Rita’s help in righting some of her past wrongs. Emilia Pérez is great fun. But it’s also about personal transformation as a beginning, not an end, an exhortation to leave the world in better shape than you found it. It’s a film with an open heart, arriving at a time when so many human hearts seem to have shut down.
7. Green Border
A serious-minded film about the plight of refugees trying to cross into Europe from the Middle East and Africa is a tough sell. But Agnieszka Holland’s film, though at times hard to watch, is so beautifully made, and so attuned to all the things we respond to as humans who care about art’s entwinement with real life, that it’s ultimately more joyful than dispiriting. Sometimes movies about difficult subjects end up being such brutal experiences you almost wish you hadn’t seen them. Green Border is the opposite: it’s likely to leave you feeling emboldened and galvanized, if also a little sadder and wiser.
6. Hard Truths
Mike Leigh is the closest we’ve got to a modern Dickens, a filmmaker whose portrayals of complex, difficult, and often unlikable people come to feel like family portraits: they may make us cringe, but we can always see bits of ourselves there too. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, so extraordinary in Leigh’s 1996 Secrets & Lies, plays Pansy, a woman who appears to be held together by her anger. She bristles with bitterness every minute; no one, including her husband (David Webber) and son (Tuwaine Barrett) can stand to be around her for long. Jean-Baptiste softens nothing about her; this is a performance as raw as a bundle of thorns, fierce and uncompromising. We never find out what makes Pansy the way she is, and there’s no comforting redemption arc. Still, somehow, we reach out to her in her unnamable pain. Leigh doesn’t give up on her, and neither can we.
5. A Complete Unknown
James Mangold’s scrappy patchwork portrait of Bob Dylan’s early years in New York isn’t a biopic. It’s a Dylan cover, an interpretation of real events filtered through memory, myth, and pure fabrication. But can you, should you, fact-check a ballad? Timothée Chalamet slouches through the movie with inquisitive, appraising eyes. Yet this film really belongs to the women, Monica Barbaro as superfamous folk singer Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, based on Suze Rotolo, an early Dylan muse but also a shrewd chronicler of the scene. These are women living in the real world. Meanwhile, the man himself sits on a rumpled bed, writing one of the world’s greatest protest songs in his underpants. As the title suggests, you’ll know less about the real Bob Dylan coming out of A Complete Unknown than you did going in. But do you think the actual Bob (an executive producer on the film) considers knowing everything about everything a worthy goal? There’s a song that goes, “He not busy being born…” You probably know the rest.
4. Anora
Sean Baker’s story of an effervescent young sex worker, Ani (Mikey Madison), who meets and falls for the rambunctious son of a Russian oligarch, spoiled rich kid Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), is part romantic comedy, part fractured fairytale—one that focuses on what happens after the golden coach turns back into a pumpkin. That’s the magic of writer-director Baker, a workaday humanist whose quiet generosity sneaks up on you. And Madison’s performance, both ebullient and piercing, is one of the year’s finest.
3. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
What happens when a country becomes desperate to control women, believing it has every right to do so? Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s shattering film offers one possible answer. A loyal government servant, Missagh Zareh’s Iman, has just been promoted to the position of investigating judge, a huge move up for him, his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and their two teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). This is what you’d call a close, loving family. But Rezvan and Sana come to see the insidiousness of the comfortable lives their father’s job has accorded them; their awareness ignites a kind of explosion. Rasoulof fled Iran last spring—just before this film was to make its premiere at Cannes—after the Islamic Republic, displeased with the content of his films, handed him an eight-year prison sentence. This film, made in the aftermath of Mahsa Amini’s 2022 death in police custody after she was arrested for her refusal to wear a hijab, is a thriller, a family drama, and a horror story. But mostly, it’s an invocation to fight back.
2. All We Imagine as Light
Everywhere you look, there are women living on their own, making their lives work in spite of long hours at their jobs, thwarted love, loneliness. In Payal Kapadia’s gorgeous study of friendship and the tensions that sometimes come with it, three women in modern Mumbai chart their own bumpy roads: Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse, is married, but she hasn’t heard from her absentee husband in years. Fellow nurse Anu (Divya Prahba) is secretly involved with a Muslim man, which she must hide from her Hindu family—and just about everybody— at all costs. And Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is an older hospital worker who loses her home because the property’s paperwork is in her late husband’s name. All of these women have come from small villages to work, to make money, to do things their own way. Kapadia captures the texture of their lives, as well as the glittery, gritty poetry of the city around them.
1. Babygirl
If you read only the synopsis of Babygirl before seeing it, you might imagine it’s an erotic age-gap thriller about the workplace power dynamic between men and women. That’s part of it, sure. But Halina Reijn’s exuberant third feature goes deeper than that, exploring the ways in which human beings—especially women—often want things they don’t know how to ask for. Nicole Kidman gives a livewire performance as Romy, a buttoned-up executive who falls under the spell of a seductive intern (Harris Dickinson, a bedroom murmur in human form). There’s so much we don’t know about desire, particularly in perimenopausal and menopausal women, and almost nobody wants to talk about it—except Reijn. The movie’s centerpiece, built around George Michael’s “Father Figure,” is one of the most rapturous sequences put to film this year, a celebration of what it means to finally, or at least temporarily, know yourself.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: The Room Next Door, A Real Pain, It’s Not Me, The Brutalist, Robot Dreams, The Fall Guy, How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer, The Fire Inside, Between the Temples, Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara, Conclave, Vermiglio, Megalopolis.
