As I write this post, I’d feel remiss not to mention the context I write it under. This past week saw the death of David Lynch, potentially one of the great American auteurs and certainly one of my favourite cinematic figures. Despite living a fruitful life artistically and personally, his loss feels grand and shocking, a hole forever left in an art form by his absence. I’m going to write a bigger and more reflective thing because he’s too big a part of my love of film not to, but for now, this is my acknowledgement of a crater that has been left in cinema.

To move to lighter territory, what treats we have had this year. As by the nature of UK release dates, the start of the year saw the overflow of 2023 films and the end saw us narrowly miss out on other future classics (we will come back for Nosferatu next year) but in between, we were hardly starved. When I examine the year, while we lack the amount of stone cold classics I felt we had last year, I see a crop of films I still love, admire and respect in equal measure. Ranking them feels tricky, because they’re such a diverse group that all succeed in different fields. How do you put Hundreds of Beavers on the same list as The Zone of Interest? Not with ease, but we strive for greatness here. As ever, a full ranked list of everything I saw from 2024 is here, argue amongst yourselves about The Beekeeper being ranked higher than The Substance or whatever it is that really riles you, but I’m here to get giddy and chat film. Let’s get into the honourable mentions!

The Delinquents

We start with what sounds like an act of self-parody, because one of my favourite films of the year is a three hour slow cinema heist movie, in which the heist happens in the first half hour. Don’t let that mislead you though, this is a warm and funny movie that absolutely basks in its luxuriously long run time.

Sleep

I am a sucker for a slick thriller with an unrelenting pace, of which Sleep is a top class one. A simple seeming story about a man with insomnia blooms into this unpredictable ride that I would recommend to everyone.

Conclave

On the one hand, Conclave can be enjoyed as a juicy drama about gossiping cardinals talking shit behind each others backs and vaping furiously. On the other hand, it’s also a very sincere drama about people grappling with their faith in a time of crisis. Whichever hand you take, it’s an old fashioned thriller that will delight everyone.

Kill

No other film on this list uses its title as a statement of intent this powerful. You go into Kill knowing that a lot of people are going to die but when the title card appears on screen halfway through the film, the action ratchets up to apocalyptic levels. It immediately joins the pantheon of cinema’s two great genres; violent action movies and train movies.

La Chimera

The world would be a richer one with more films like La Chimera. For her latest magical journey, Alice Rohrwacher takes us into the underworld through the lives of graverobbers and once again proves how much joy can be found by just digging a little deeper.

Better Man

The Robbie Williams monkey movie is phenomenal! That’s the headline! In a world plagued by boring biopics, choose something that feels alive. Hyperbole aside, I was in tears for huge portions of this film and sat with my jaw agape at the rest. Don’t be the last one to discover this slice of fried gold.

Dune: Part Two

Dune: Part Two may be one of the most important and seismic achievements in sci-fi film this century. It also doesn’t even crack my top 7 this year. Maybe this is a great year in film. The original source novel is one of the knottiest of its type and where the first part was an admirable adaptation, this second is a true treat, two and a half hours of all cake after finishing your main meal.

The Iron Claw

If you ever wanted to know what it feels like for your emotions to be hit by every car on a motorway, try The Iron Claw! This story of wrestling brothers goes from heartbreak to heartbreak in a true life story so sad that they had to remove some of the events because it would have seemed too ridiculous. My beautiful boys love each other so much and are so bad at processing any familial trauma, come suplex my heart!

And now onto the big Top 7!

7. Anora

I’ve been a fan of Sean Baker since his film The Florida Project and a full-blown fan after Red Rocket knocked my socks off a few years ago. With his newest film Anora, he has returned with a film that is at once the culmination of all he has been building to over the decades, and also his most accessible and purely enjoyable film yet. It’s the comedic tale of a sex worker who falls in love with the son of a rich Russian family and how that relationship spins in and out of control. To say this thing is charming is an understatement. Baker’s usual mastery of script and editing are on display but with Mikey Madison, he has found his most electric lead yet (which I promise is tough competition). Her performance is what holds this big film together, playing up the comedy and anchoring the pathos in what may be my favourite performance of the year. She keeps you utterly and totally engaged until the sucker punch ending, one which I was unsure of the first time I saw it but which completely stuck with me after and devastated me on a second watch. I’m still working out where Anora sits in my overall Baker rankings, but just on its own merits it is very soundly one of the best films of the year.

6. The Zone of Interest

Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, there’s no easy way to talk about The Zone of Interest and compare it to other films from the year. It is singular, it is urgent and it is distressing in ways that no other film has been. It’s also an inherently cinematic way of approaching the Holocaust but without exploiting or turning the event into melodrama. For what is somehow only his fourth film, Johnathan Glazer places us inside the house of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, a house he shares with his family and that shares a wall with Auschwitz itself. We follow not the atrocities being committed inside the extermination camp but the banality occurring inside the house. People are planting flowers, making dinner, having their friends over, all while ignoring an evil they are complicit in. For me, Glazer’s film works for three big reasons. First, the boredom. It forces you to be alone with your thoughts as people do chores, making you perversely wish for something to happen. That leads into the second thing, it creates complicity between the audience and the lead characters, putting us in the uncomfortable place of being on the side of fascists. But that’s wrong, isn’t it? We aren’t a world that could sit by and write blogs, eat at restaurants, watch Bargain Hunt while a genocide is being committed, are we? Are we? The third and final reason is a scene near the end of the film, in which Höss stares down a dark corridor and is greeted by a vision of modern day Auschwitz, in which staff are seen cleaning the exhibitions that house the former possessions of the victims of the Holocaust. It is a startling reminder that though these events happened many decades ago, we are not as removed from them as we may wish to believe we are. All of these things have made the reputation of The Zone of Interest a little sticky, with many not really knowing how to approach it, though they are the same things that will cement this as one of the truly important films of our time. It is a purely cinematic product and a thing to marvel at, which is good because it is not a film you should look away form.

5. Poor Things

There’s no easy segue between that and this, but now it’s time for a new adventure from Yorgos Lanthimos! Though I enjoyed his demented triptych Kinds of Kindness, I found myself more wholly transported by his earlier film last year, Poor Things. Here, he dips his toes into the fantastical more than ever before (we can argue if The Lobster is sci-fi or just odd) in creating a story unlike any other. His tale is of Bella Baxter, a perfectly ordinary young woman except for the fact that she has the brain of a baby. Literally. Poor Things follows Bella’s journey as she discovers the world and herself, embracing all with a joy that is infectious. I’ve left many Lanthimos films with a feeling of being absolutely sick to my stomach from dread, violence or some combination of the two. Poor Things is the first of his films that I’ve left feeling gleeful. It’s as if, after two decades of peering at humanity’s depravity, pain and hatred, Lanthimos found the joy of the world. Naturally, the joy he finds is in the world of his that least resembles this world of ours, but the point stands regardless. There’s a quote from It’s Such a Beautiful Day that rolls around my head a lot, where the main character Bill, facing their likely death, says to a stranger “Isn’t everything amazing?” When we’re distant from death or birth, we fail to grasp the beauty that Bill or Bella see, and it’s beauty that Lanthimos leaves his audience with. He’s still too much of a gleeful trickster to play it completely sunny (the main character exists only because of a suicide to posit just one downer note) but Poor Things feels like a special addition to his filmography because it gives the audience genuine hope for the first time. Maybe the last time.

4. The Taste of Things

There are, if we are to cast broad aspersions, two types of French film. There is the weirdo, surreal, arthouse nonsense (more on that later) and there is the slow, sensitive, rather sexy film. Your mileage with both will vary but with The Taste of Things, we find perhaps the most French take on a French film yet. It’s a slow paced romance about two people cooking for each other and without wanting to be dramatic, it is one of the most searingly romantic films I have ever seen. I would be lying if I tried to extend the summary and say that actually this film is about more than that, but the very strength of The Taste of Things is that it is about nothing more than food and love. You know, food and love, those two things that are essential to our physical and emotional wellbeing! No biggie! The cooking scenes in this are unbelievable, some of the finest cooking scenes I have ever seen. Through the eyes of a young participant in the kitchen, we are guided through every step of preparing these elaborate meals, with one prepared over the course of half an hour of in-film time. You will wish for longer before dessert is even mentioned. It’s one of those films where you need to slow down and get into the pace of the film, because when you do your stomach and heart will be filled. Sensual is the only word that comes close to explaining the alchemical power of The Taste of Things, so lean in and take a bite. You may be hungrier than you realise.

3. Hundreds of Beavers

When I have slow cinema, surrealism and big serious movies populating my best of the year list, I worry that I’m losing my touch. Where is my silliness? My joy? My ability to wind people up? Then I see a film like Hundreds of Beavers. This is a film in which a huntsman goes to war with hundreds of beavers. That’s it. That’s the plot. Man versus beast, again and again and again. While that may sound ridiculous, what may shock you is that it actually is just as, if not more, ridiculous than it sounds. This is slapstick comedy at its finest, building off simple pratfalls into unbelievably elaborate references, call-backs and set-pieces that are engineered into a perfect little structure of a film. By the time you reach the top, you look back and are in awe of how well all the little pieces from before fit in to the whole. I find myself stuck with finding more to say. The film speaks itself is evidence enough of its own brilliance. This is a funny film that is very smart in how it chooses to make you laugh, made on a budget that couldn’t even cover catering for most of the other films on this list. If you’re in the UK (as I know most of you lot are), the film is embarking on a nationwide tour with an in-person Q&A and a bunch of merch at each stop. Even though I’ve already seen the film, this is an idea so tempting that I might forsake my blu-ray copy and go in to the cinemas for another chance to hoot and howl with strangers again. I highly suggest you do too, and if you do please buy me merch, I need a poster for this, please.

2. Challengers

Like with Yorgos Lanthimos, Luca Guadagnino released two fantastic films this year and while his sad and mercurial Queer just missed out on the list, Challengers absolutely storms the top two. No film left me with such ecstasy pulsing through my system as Challengers did. I immediately came home, breathless, and attempted to explain to my partner how good the film was (poorly, apparently, she still hasn’t seen it.) For those who still carry the shame of not being in the know, Challengers is the story of two best friends who both fall for the same girl, all while they’re coming up in the professional tennis scene. The film zips around in their life, from when they exit the amateur scene up to a climactic match between the two friends, never once losing a single shred of momentum. No film this year has moved like Challengers, which has if not the best then certainly the most exciting cinematography, editing and structure of any film this year (not that the Oscars would agree.) During my first viewing, I kept feeling worried that there would be a mistake, a slip-up, some fault that would make the film fall on its knees. Reader, there was no such incident, this is a film that only gets stronger as we careen towards the finale. And the finale? Oh man. If you thought the film was great before this scene, you have another thing coming, as the entire creative team fire on all cylinders. It is the kind of scene that makes you sprint out the cinema, run back home and excitedly tell whoever you see that they have to watch Challengers (source: I did this.) If somehow I still haven’t convinced you, put the score on. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross created a pulsating techno beat that runs under the whole film and is so good that I almost put it on my best albums of the year list. Please please please, watch Challengers. Though it isn’t my number one film of the year, it is an effortless recommendation to all and the film I am most desperate to rewatch at all times of every day.

1. The Beast

In a purely accidental move, here is a film whose surreal brilliance feels like a modern answer to David Lynch, a pushing at the form of the medium that I imagine he would have loved. The Beast is a sci-fi tale that leaps through time and through worlds to tell a tale of eternal love. You’re going to have to stick with me on this one. Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is a woman who, in the near future, decides to purge her emotions in order to make herself better at her job. To do this, she must explore her past lives and purify them from strong feelings, often connected to the same man (George MacKay) who keeps haunting her pasts. In one life, we are in a flooded Paris shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. In another, we are in modern day Los Angeles, seeing actresses and incels mingle like oil and water. The two meet in all these times in different guises and also meet in their future present, sharing hushed conversations and glances across the room at a retro nightclub. During this exploration, the two find themselves drawn together romantically, yet always being tragically torn apart before they can act upon the romance that threatens to explode from their chests.

It’s at this point that I should mention that The Beast is adapted from a Henry James novella called The Beast in the Jungle, which I wasn’t familiar with before the film but that provides a crucial lens to read through. In this story, a man finds himself drawn towards a lover but cannot consummate the relationship as he has been told of a catastrophe that awaits him (the titular and metaphorical Beast) and so lives an unremarkable life, just distant enough from his love to avoid hurting her. It is only at the end of his life though that he realises the great catastrophe he was warned of was to find love and squander it, to spend your life too paralysed by fear to ever act on your own happiness. As someone who finds himself in the clutches of anxiety, I’d be lying if I said that didn’t resonate, and it’s this anxious feeling that permeates the film from start to pulse racing finale. Our two characters keep approaching, keep getting close, keep waiting for the terrible thing to happen, until they realise that this terrible thing has already happened, born out of their own fear. Lynch feels like the touchstone for me because while I wasn’t always sure of the narrative thrust of The Beast, I was always certain of its emotional intent and it was an emotion that struck me deep to my core. This is a film that pushes at its audience, plays with cinematic form, practically begs you to disengage. Yet, if you make the leap that the protagonists couldn’t and commit yourself fully before the film reaches its denouement, you will be wildly rewarded. What a remarkable film. A thing so tangibly romantic, yet pierced by horror and doomed by tragedy. Like the love at the films core, I hope it transcends time itself and becomes eternal.