Inward facing and outright wild, 2024 was a hell of a ride for cinema.

Look back on it with ILT’s top 10 films of the year…Follow ILT on twitter @iltfilm
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10. A Complete Unknown

Dir: James Mangold

It isn’t exactly a hot take to proclaim music biopics as the modern cinematic bomb scare. Designed to blast nostalgia first and ask questions never, the standard entry offers drunken karaoke vibes with little to no compelling exploration of its artist. A Complete Unknown did at least have potential, with Timothée Chalamet playing Bob Dylan and solid-as-a-rock dadcore director James Mangold in the chair. Defying our low expectations, the man who made Walk the Line delivers a dreamy take on Dylan’s early-60s rise that falls into the rarely seen centre of the “OK, boomer” / “this is good” Venn diagram. With minimal dialogue and seemingly half of Dylan’s catalogue crammed into 140 minutes, A Complete Unknown is still just karaoke, but it is top tier, wanker-who-can-actually-sing karaoke, thanks to proper movie star turns from Chalamet, Edward Norton, and the mind-blowing Monica Barbaro as Joan Beaz. There may be no stakes (spoiler: Dylan goes electric), but there is Norton’s Pete Seeger belting out ‘Wimoweh’ backed by an audience acapella, which for some reason touches the soul like chicken soup on a rainy day.

Shout outs to Late Night with the Devil, a cool indie horror that held this spot for most of the year, and to Sing Sing, a quite beautiful prison drama that deserves to be seen by a much wider audience.
Watch the trailer here…

9. Civil War

Dir: Alex Garland

Who would have thought a film called Civil War would be so divisive. The point of Alex Garland’s slick action thriller is not how the dystopian, former United States came to be, but the nightmarish nature of its inevitable destruction. In the unfathomable horror of a long, drawn out conflict, Civil War represents the bleak, hurried blip of humanity trying to lift a derailed train back onto the track. It is more aligned with the historical context of the Battle of Berlin or the Fall of Saigon than it is with the epic nature of the wars that led to those desperate few days of death or victory. It represents little more than the grim truth that morality and logic have and will once again be removed from the equation should an event like this come to pass. It also happened to look and sound sensational on the big screen, with a killer soundtrack hyping up a killer Jesse Plemons. Watch it somewhere loud.
Watch the trailer here…

8. Strange Darling

Dir: J.T. Mollner

Strange Darling had no right to hit as hard as it did. Before it even came out, J.T. Mollner’s chase thriller appeared to have been ruined by the press, which pointed to its MASSIVE TWIST, and by its own marketing team, which then promoted the MASSIVE TWIST. In reality, the MASSIVE TWIST has and will continue to be spotted from miles away by most casual cinema-goers, and it is certainly is not what made Strange Darling the surprising banger of the summer. When a random indie flick lets you know almost immediately that it intends to be brutally violent in a non-linear fashion, the QT-shaped red flags are rightfully run straight up the pole. We needn’t worry, however, as Mollner shapes an engrossing, ultimately explosive conflict between the nameless lovers-turned-nemeses at the centre of the story, played by Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner. While they willingly tear chunks out of one another, the origin of their beef is slowly and effectively brought to the surface. There is no big reveal, just a skillful unravelling of breathless suspense that fucks with your trust issues harder than that time someone gave you the wrong baggy.
Watch the trailer here…

7. Nickel Boys

Dir: RaMell Ross

There has never been a film quite like Nickel Boys. Shot from the POV of two Black teenagers in early-1960s Florida, RaMell Ross’s fictional feature debut centres on the reform school Nickel Academy, a facility rooted in Jim Crow era segregation. The decision by Ross to shoot from a dual first person perspective adds unparalleled depth to our lead characters. Instead of looking from the outside in, surrounded by a variety of cinematic techniques designed to help us feel empathy, we are forced to look from the inside out with only the immediate experience of first Elwood and then Turner to guide us. As they suffer, we suffer with them, and it is raw and unrelenting, but never forced. By taking the organic approach, Ross reminds us in the starkest possible terms that this actually happened to thousands of human beings as recently as 60 years ago, for no reason other than the colour of their skin. In a time where the lines of ethicality and justice are blurring amongst the masses, Nickel Boys is a crucial text that should be absorbed with empathy and studied closely.
Watch the trailer here…

6. Oh, Canada

Dir: Paul Schrader

Paul Schrader may seem like the oldest man in Hollywood, but really he’s just another old crank rotating slowly somewhere in the big machine. Facing his own mortality during the pandemic, Schrader turned a camera on the subject in the form of Oh, Canada, an adaptation of the novel Foregone by his late friend Russell Banks. Never one to back away from mankind’s capacity to be truly reprehensible, Schrader examines the depths people will sink to as a means of escape from their everyday responsibility. The unreliable narrative constructed to hold such a heavy heart comes crashing down during the final interview-turned-bleak life confession of Richard Gere’s dying filmmaker, Leo Fife. Schrader’s greatest trick is his ability to make his dubious leads somehow relatable and even sympathetic, and Oh, Canada is no exception. Schrader muddies the bombastic, real time disintegration of Fife’s cult hero status with flashbacks to Jacob Elordi’s haunted, yet perfectly restrained version of his younger self. Gorgeous and dreamlike in its visual style, Oh, Canada is a complete Schrader of a picture that will divide audiences in spite of the presence of Uma Thurman, who it was quite lovely to see after 20 years.
Watch the trailer here…

5. The Brutalist

Dir: Brady Corbet

It’s been a solid few years for the American epic. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer represented a resurgence in the idea that the United States has and will continue to eat itself in the pursuit of fame, greed, and power. The Brutalist may not be as grand in scale, but its dissection of the post-war immigrant journey in America arguably reaches far beyond the thematic scope of American self-destruction explored by its cinematic contemporaries, building past the present day and into the cold, not-so-distant future. In the aftermath of 2018’s Vox Lux, a deeply weird and unpleasant film, the suggestion that Brady Corbet would be the one to pull this off would have raised an eyebrow or two, but no more.  The Brutalist is a technical marvel and a character study masterclass, carried in achingly beautiful fashion by Adrien Brody’s Hungarian-Jewish architect, alongside a hammer blow performance by Guy Pearce as his wealthy benefactor. The second half does at times fall short of its captivating predecessor, but Corbet gets it done, supported all the way in by Brody, Pearce, and a quite monumental score composed by Daniel Blumberg.
Watch the trailer here…

4. The Wild Robot

Dir: Chris Sanders

Has the scientific community ever concluded why certain animated films generate so much dust? One minute you’re watching the telly, the next there’s something in your eye, and before you know it the tears are well and truly rolling. In a year when the phenomenal financial success of Inside Out 2 brought Pixar back from the brink, it was The Wild Robot (and Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow) that carried the animation conversation, and with good reason. Chris Sanders’ adaptation of Peter Brown’s novel gives us the strongest dose of animated storytelling since 2017’s Coco, soaring majestically through its emotionally-charged journey of motherhood and parental sacrifice, all while managing to be one of funniest films of the year. Brought to life by a stunning visual style that maximizes the epic natural surroundings of Roz the Robot and her gosling charge, The Wild Robot is a magical behemoth of animation that will give you the most cathartic release you could possibly wish for.
Watch the trailer here…

3. Red Rooms

Dir: Pascal Plante

For some of us, it feels like yesterday when dial-up internet reigned supreme on the family desktop. Now, a mere few decades into the 21st century, we are suddenly so deep into the digital age that there is seemingly nothing you cannot do online. Gambling, sordid chat rooms, illegal marketplaces, snuff films; any and everything you can imagine has been discussed, filmed, bought, and sold behind the curtain of anonymity that is the dark web. French-Canadian director Pascal Plante makes our perception of the internet’s underbelly uncomfortably real in Red Rooms, a mesmerizing re-invention of the cerebral thriller that blurs the line between our online and real world fantasies. Juliette Gariépy’s Kelly-Anne, a successful model and true-crime obsessive, is one of the most frightening and fucked up characters this side of Y2K, yet it is impossible not to follow her down the rabbit hole of humanity’s lost soul, as she does everything she can to get into the mind and matter of a serial killer and his young female victims. Unpredictable, shocking, and laced with cold-blooded tension, Red Rooms reaches levels of psychological depravity that you will not be able to unsee for quite some time.
Watch the trailer here…

2. Challengers

Dir: Luca Guadagnino

Tennis, techno, love triangle…let’s go. However you break it down, Challengers is an absolute banger. Coming in hot off Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All, Luca Guadagnino continues to breathe new life into the offbeat onscreen love story. Simultaneously, in Challengers, he produced one of the best sports films of the modern era. Set against the backdrop of a present day championship match at a lowkey Challenger event, Guadagnino fires us back and forth across time, piecing together the complicated relationship of the two players slugging it out and the woman in the stands holding their unbroken attention. It is clear that the finalists are playing for one thing, and it isn’t the trophy sitting courtside. Electric in its execution, Challengers is an unabashed throwback to a hot-as-fuck type of cinematic romance, that under Guadagnino’s eye is never sleazy for the sake of being sleazy. Rather, it flirts convincingly with his ballsy style of prestige filmmaking, personified by three frankly jaw-dropping performances by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist. Not only does it look incredible and move as forcefully as a serve straight of the arm of Goran Ivanišević, it has perhaps the most surprising, and certainly the most effective score of the year from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Watch the trailer here…

1. Anora

Dir: Sean Baker

Sean Baker has long threatened a masterpiece, and in 2024 it arrived in the form of Anora, a romantic-comedy-drama that slaps aside expectations to achieve a payoff on par with the ill-gotten gains of any post-Soviet oligarch. Returning to the American underside for another brutally frank examination of modern sex work, Baker goes large, hard, and fast, dropping us straight into the New York City strip club scene. There, we meet Mikey Madison’s Anora, whose capacity for the Russian language leads her to the playboy son of a billionaire and apparently the ideal client, as within weeks the pair are married in Vegas and shacked up in Ivan’s mansion. Naturally, when Ivan’s parents find out he’s married a stripper, all bets are off. By winding Anora tightly around its titular character, Baker presents a straightforward and increasingly tense journey of self-preservation, delivered at breakneck speed as Anora soon finds herself in the grasp of several bemused minders (including a standout Yura Borisov), whose only goal is to annul her shotgun marriage.

Rarely does a tragicomedy live up to its billing with such ease and consistency. Anora is deliberately hilarious, yet remains tethered to the deeply sinister reality that a billionaire’s whim is another person’s whole life. Baker’s witty dialogue goes harder than a 3-carat diamond, polished by an array of committed and self-aware performances and fronted by Madison, who rides her focal point status with an undying charisma that carries the film to its devastating, yet fully earned conclusion. When she and Baker land the plane, they do so with a cold, hard reality that lingers long after the cut to black. A modern masterpiece, Anora is the one true five-star film of 2024.
Watch the trailer here…
Read ILT’s full review here…

Looking for movie recommendations from the past decade? ILT can help!
Check out ILT’s Top 10 Films of:
2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015

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