The Daily Beast’s 10 Best Movies of 2024

Whereas 2023 was dominated by two American epics—one historical (Oppenheimer), one pop-cultural (Barbie)—this year boasts no singularly defining critical or commercial work. Far from being a negative, though, that situation simply means that the bounties of the past twelve months were spread far and wide.

From the snowy confines of Park City, Utah, to the warm and glittering Croisette of Cannes, to the bustling streets of Venice, Toronto, and New York City, film festivals showcased a wealth of remarkable features that have since graced domestic screens. The diversity of those offerings was a reminder that the international scene remains as vibrant as ever. Not to be outdone, however, U.S. artists embraced and reimagined tried-and-true genres to impressive effect, refracting the old through the new in ways that were electrifying, inspiring, and heartbreaking.

Be it Mohammad Rasoulof’s harrowing sociopolitical critique The Seed of the Sacred Fig and Payal Kapadia’s lyrical drama All We Imagine as Light, or Maura Delpero’s painterly period piece Vermiglio and Mike Leigh’s hard-bitten contemporary gem Hard Truths, there was plenty to celebrate from distant shores.

At home, things were no less noteworthy. At 94 years old, Clint Eastwood reconfirmed his standing as one of the medium’s all-time greats with the efficient, harrowing Juror #2. Sean Baker delivered a day-night odyssey of screwball delights with Anora. Mike Cheslik constructed a wild live-action Looney Tunes-esque cartoon with Hundreds of Beavers. And Oz Perkins reshaped the serial killer thriller into a hallucinatory nightmare with Longlegs—a horror affair which also proved that no actor is more consistently daring and unpredictable than Nicolas Cage.

Throw in larger-than-life blockbusters (Dune: Part 2), indie originals (In a Violent Nature), dark phantasmagoric trips (The Substance), timely near-future nail-biters (Civil War), and even timelier Trumpian takedowns (The Apprentice), and moviegoers didn’t lack for stellar cinematic options. Even so, a select few towered above the rest, and it’s those standouts which we celebrate with this, our rundown of the Best Films of 2024.

10. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

A return home instigates an inquiry into the past in Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, a Vietnamese film whose deceptively simple narrative belies its complex concerns and haunting power. Tasked with visiting his rural village to care for his now-orphaned five-year-old nephew, twentysomething bachelor Thien (Le Phong Vu) reconnects with former friends and loves, and embarks on a quest into the vast countryside to locate his brother.

Traversing an ethereal landscape where the boundaries between the real and the unreal are flimsy at best, Thien grapples with questions of faith, loss, and loyalty. Writer/director Ân dramatizes that journey with a series of immensely long, breathtakingly composed takes that amplify the material’s illusoriness, turning it into an evocative reverie of loss, family, and God.

Where to Watch: On Demand

9. The Fall Guy

Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt partner for a joyous mainstream American spectacular with The Fall Guy, director David Leitch’s funny, action-packed, and romantic ode to those who take the hits not for glory but, rather, for the love of the movies.

Gosling has rarely been more magnetic than he is as Colt Seavers, a down-on-his-luck stunt man who gets a comeback shot via a sci-fi extravaganza being helmed by his former flame (Blunt), only to find himself searching for the egomaniacal leading man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who’s gone mysteriously missing. With wit and charm to burn, Gosling makes this high-flying adventure hum, and his chemistry with Blunt lends it a spark that transforms it into precisely the sort of something-for-everything venture that Hollywood does so well.

Where to Watch: Peacock, On Demand

8. A Real Pain

A Real Pain’s title refers to many things, most of them having to do with Benji (Kieran Culkin), a multifaceted mess who’s on a vacation with his cousin David (Jesse Eisenberg) in Poland, where they plan to tour a concentration camp and visit the birthplace of their beloved grandmother. Eisenberg’s sophomore behind-the-camera outing is a comedy laced with sorrow, its humor springing forth from the fissures threatening to tear its main character apart.

As they trek through their ancestral European homeland, Benji and David make new friends, survive mishaps, bristle with each other, and cope with personal and historical scars that have yet to (and may never) fully heal. Led by Culkin’s tour-de-force, it’s a film that gets under the skin and into one’s heart.

Where to Watch: In Theaters

7. Hit Man

Glen Powell makes a successful bid for movie superstardom with Hit Man, a Richard Linklater crime comedy that’s galvanized by its leading man’s charisma. Playing a goofy professor who winds up working for the police as an undercover agent tasked with getting criminals to confess their offenses on wiretaps, Powell dons a variety of clownish disguises and falls for an alluring suspect (Adria Arjona) with whom he shares blindingly bright sparks, highlighted by a Notes app-facilitated ruse that may be 2024’s sexiest scene.

Breezy, fleet, and hotter than most of its contemporary big-screen brethren, Linklater’s latest illustrates precisely why tried-and-true genres remain so popular—especially when they have a headliner capable of making even the daffiest plot twists surprising, amusing, and exciting.

Where to Watch: Netflix

6. The Brutalist

A magnificent monument to pain and the things that grow out of it, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a three-hour-and-35-minute epic of perseverance, suffering, and anti-Semitic trauma, all of which is streaked across the unforgettable visage of László (a phenomenal Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jew who, following the end of WWII, emigrates to America.

Separated from his wife (Felicity Jones) and niece, and taken in by his cousin (Alessandro Nivola), the man slowly rebuilds himself and the architectural career that was stolen from him, eventually pioneering—with the aid of a wealthy benefactor (Guy Pearce)—a new form that speaks formidably and poignantly to his agony. Split into two parts, writer/director Corbet’s third feature is a formally majestic and intensely moving portrait of unthinkable tragedy and rousing triumph.

Where to Watch: In Theaters

5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Radu Jude is cinema’s reigning flamethrower, and he lobs a Molotov cocktail at our modern state of disarray with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. A scintillating and freewheeling takedown of commercialism, misogyny, bigotry, corporate greed, worker exploitation, and social media insanity, the Romanian auteur’s gonzo dramedy follows a film production assistant (Ilinca Manolache) as she conducts interviews for a safety-related public-service video.

In her free time, though, she makes online clips as her alter-ego Bobita, a profane chauvinist reactionary whose tirades encapsulate 21st-century ugliness. Shot in black-and-white and pieced together with rebellious style (including cutaways to a 1981 Lucian Bratu color movie), it’s an eclectic, dynamic, and wide-ranging evisceration of the End Times, which to Jude appear to be right now.

Where to Watch: Mubi, On Demand

4. The End

Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence) is a filmmaker fascinated by the aftermath of atrocities, and the way in which people—both those responsible for, and victimized by, calamity—move forward. The End is another inquiry into such topics, filtered through the story of a family (led by Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon) residing in a sprawling bunker decades after an environmental apocalypse.

Oppenheimer complicates these survivors’ situation by introducing a stranger into their hermetically sealed home, and he has them give voice to their fears, frustrations, guilt, and shame through musical numbers that are as touching as they are chilling. Crafted with dexterous care and attention to emotional and psychological detail, it’s like nothing else seen in theaters this year.

Where to Watch: In Theaters

3. Red Rooms

Red Rooms contains no on-screen bloodshed or violence, but Canadian writer/director Pascal Plante’s film is still the most unsettling thriller in recent memory. Fashion model Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) spends her days attending the trial of an alleged serial killer and her nights trawling the dark web—two sides of the same compulsive coin.

Earning a living by gambling online, and scouring the Internet for the perpetrator’s infamous snuff films, Kelly-Anne is a woman lost in a digital netherworld that breeds disconnection, and her estrangement isn’t alleviated by her relationship with a young woman who believes the fiend is innocent. Peaking with Kelly-Anne’s unforgettable act of identification with the objects of her obsession, Plante’s slow-burner is a deeply disquieting treatise on true-crime fandom and techno-alienation, conveying volumes about our modern malaise via the unforgettable countenance of its star.

Where to Watch: On Demand

2. A Different Man

A spiraling mind-melter with a tremendous Sebastian Stan at its center, A Different Man concerns a facially disfigured man who stumbles upon a medical cure for his physical condition and remakes himself as the handsome hunk he always wanted to be—until, that is, his life continues turning crazily upside-down, including courtesy of an encounter with a stranger (Adam Pearson) who looks just like he once did.

Writer/director Aaron Schimberg’s third film is an identity-crisis fever dream that feels as if it’s been stitched together with pieces from John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (among numerous others). Nonetheless, it has a distinctively deranged vitality all its own, with Stan—doing the most outstanding work of his career—embodying his protagonist with a complex combination of envy, ambition, frustration, and frenzied rage.

Where to Watch: On Demand

1. Nosferatu

Robert Eggers firmly establishes himself as cinema’s reigning horror maestro with Nosferatu, a bloodcurdling vampiric saga whose eroticism heightens its terror. A remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic (which was based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and also inspired Werner Herzog’s 1979 version), Eggers’ fourth feature is a sexualized gothic fairy tale about Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), an ancient Romanian bloodsucker who endeavors, with the aid of real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), to travel to Germany to find Thomas’ wife Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), with whom he shares a carnal, corrupting bond.

Marked by one breathtaking tableau after another, a score of malevolent majesty, and stellar performances from its cast, it’s a fetid feast for the senses, its every nook and cranny oozing pestilence and malice. Marrying sumptuous form and unhinged content, the writer/director’s latest is his finest achievement to date: a new genre masterpiece, and the best film of 2024.

Where to Watch: In Theaters

Honorable Mention: Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Close Your Eyes, All We Imagine as Light, Juror #2, Evil Does Not Exist, Last Summer, Anora, Babygirl, Hundreds of Beavers.