As usual, I perhaps spoke a bit prematurely about a great deal in my wrap-up last year. For the first time I can remember, I switched to a different #1 within the following year; while I still adore Walk Up and look forward to revisiting it soon, it’s probably not a greater, more mysterious achievement than Pacifiction. More importantly however, I genuinely believe that as strong as 2023 was as a release year, 2024 was even better, albeit in a harder to define way. Though many do consider this a banner year for film—plenty don’t, which could be influenced by what appears to be an unusually weak premiere year—it’s refreshingly difficult to find a uniform consensus on what exactly constitutes the year’s highlights. The less charitable will argue that there’s still much more agreement than there should be, and indeed at least one of my top three can be found in nearly any respectable list, but the picture is far more murky than the past few years. For a variety of reasons, I watched a far larger number of films than I have in a long time, including many of the most obvious contenders for critics’ lists or awards consideration, which nevertheless had a largely negligible effect on my top 10. Correspondingly, there are many causes célèbres which, whether I liked them or not, didn’t really come close to even being an honorable mention: some in no particular order, Red Rooms, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Good One, I Saw the TV Glow, Hundreds of Beavers, Challengers, The People’s Joker, The Substance, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Juror #2, No Other Land, Trap, Janet Planet, and many more.

To invert the title of one of the many great films this year, many of the best films of 2024 felt like ghosts of pictures, will-o’-the-wisps whose impact was enormous even as their precise import was elusive. Of course, that describes many of the films that I naturally gravitate towards, but it felt especially notable that so many of them embraced a certain irresoluteness that aimed towards a minor key. For all their ambiguity, films like Anatomy of a Fall, Afire, and even Showing Up felt more forceful in their aims, clear highlights in their filmmakers’s oeuvres that even these following films don’t. This might just be my inherent defensiveness, even given the relative lack of consensus this year, but it was a trend that felt welcome. (This is definitely a less polemical/voluble introduction/list than last year, but that’s not meant to reflect my lack of enthusiasm for these films or this year at large, far from it.)

As always, this list is merely meant to capture my feelings about the films I was able to see at this moment in time, strictly limited to the films that were theatrically released in New York City this year.

1. The Beast. The boldest, most heart-wrenching film of the year, and the fact that it coincided with the distended development of my Nocturama Reverse Shot piece felt like divine providence. I’ve probably spoken too much about how much its tonal variance across the three parts perfectly maps onto the spirit (certainly not the letter) of its putative source, but suffice it to say that Bertrand Bonello and his brilliantly volatile lead actors burrowed into the heart of a doomed romanticism, feeling more deeply and dangerously than anyone else this year.

2. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. This, unlike a film just a few spots down this list, is the film that best sums up what it means to be alive this decade, probably for the worse. But Radu Jude’s dazzling admixture of sources, his daring willingness to not only make crass light of the workaholic hellscape we live in but to pay genuine, unflinching tribute to those it has spit out, is its own sort of tonic.

3. Evil Does Not Exist. The rare film where virtually every aspect seems to get more mysterious: its place in Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s body of work; its shifting stance on humanity and nature, town and country; its own relationship with Gift, which I had the good fortune of seeing twice this year as well. It was probably destined to be received a little more coolly than Drive My Car (little notice from critics’ groups, not making the Film Comment top 5) and I’m still not exactly sure how much I adore it. But its unerring focus, its ability to metamorphose and unsettle, is still one of the great achievements in filmmaking this year, and that’s more than enough.

4. Music. Somehow the earliest film I saw on this list (thanks to the Taipei Film Festival), but it’s still the one that confounds me the most, particularly in the way it handles its narrative. While it was perhaps too much to expect that Angela Schanelec’s recognition would continue to build upon the mild breakthrough of I Was at Home, But…, her decision to make things ever more abstruse simultaneously further developed her sense for ineffable emotions, yoked to a startling engagement with myth that enhances it as much as the plaintiveness of the songs at its core.

5. The Human Surge 3. Ironically, I actually don’t think this surpassed its predecessor in one crucial respect: while The Human Surge remains the key document of life in the 2010s, I sense a certain remove, caused both by the 360-degree camera and the deliberate murkiness of its narratives. But in every other respect, Eduardo Williams doubles down on what made that such a fascinating, generative work. It definitely doesn’t hurt to see Taiwan in the mix, and its use here, first only glimpsed briefly and then serving as the focus in what does rank for me as the greatest sequence of this decade, feels like a perfect encapsulation of the playful, unpredictable spirit.

6. A tie between Wang Bing’s Youth (Homecoming) and Youth (Hard Times). As obvious as this tie is, it’s a bit of a necessary cop-out for reasons I’ll get into below. I’ve written about the third prong of Wang Bing’s monumental trilogy multiple times already as the culmination and the greatest entry, but it’s true that the two are perhaps more interchangeable for me than that would suggest. Watching them on back-to-back days, they each possessed their own strengths: Hard Times was the most purely engaging, the most concentrated from scene-to-scene, and the interview with the worker towards the end might be the pinnacle of the project. But Homecoming, while it maybe grabbed me slightly less while I was watching it, seems to stand for something greater for itself: not only Youth as a whole, but also the experiences of these people which, by dint of its expansion in setting and personal relationships, this seems to fully capture the best. Obviously, they’re both among the essential films of the year.

7. In Our Day. One of those perfect “minor major” Hong Sang-soo’s which invariably makes it onto my lists, which doesn’t make them any less exciting or surprising to experience. Here, the interwoven narratives and the connections that they allow for is, in its own way, as exciting as Walk Up‘s, and the joy present in the simple scenes of communal eating and drinking games goes a great deal towards illuminating the strengths of his recent work.

8. Last Summer. Still haven’t seen nearly as many of Catherine Breillat’s films as I should have, but it was nevertheless gratifying to watch something so delectably in tune with its protagonist, turning every decision into something equally monstrous and sensible, even justified in the moral schema of the film. The fact that the film ends where it does, not exactly condemning its characters to their lies but also suggesting the extents to which they can bury each other, is a total wonder.

9. I’ts Not Me. Technically, Leos Carax’s immense 40-minute work shouldn’t be on this list, for the simple fact of its unusual simultaneous theatrical and streaming release. For that reason, it only played a single day in general release in New York City, and won’t feature on my top 10 release year lists by the strictest standards. But I couldn’t imagine a list of this sort without it, and because pairing it and the following entry would make less sense than placing the Youths together, it gets its own richly deserving spot here. I could say a great deal about its mischievous yet loving relationship to late Godard, the astonishing insight it provides into taboo and thorny subject matter, the beauty of its aphorisms on looking and storytelling. But what sticks with me most is the wondrous, unfairly maligned post-credits scene, an amalgam of Carax’s past work that finds the perfect balance between embodiment and artifice, the beauty of motion and the awareness of what must go into its creation.

10. A Traveler’s Needs. This Hong gets into this list on a technicality, which isn’t to downplay its brilliance whatsoever. Just as much as the other Hong on this list, this feels so much bigger than the single day that it seems to span, a series of intimate interactions that refuses to let on more about its central figure than absolutely necessary. The emotional range that Huppert’s “French lessons” engender, and how she in turn interprets them, is still one of the most mysterious things in his recent body of work, and a fascinating turn in their ongoing collaboration.

Even when expanding to eleven, that still leaves out the beautiful reflection on character and place in Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower, the elegiac meta-cinematic texts of Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes, Lisandro Alonso’s confounding and mystical Eureka, the city/forest rhapsody of Bas Devos’s Here, and Sean Baker’s wildly heartbreaking Anora. Some other amazing, appropriately elusive works that won’t even finish off my green color-coded films: RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (genuinely radical image-making tied to its characters), Phạm Thiên Ân’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (the most purely beautiful film of the year), Bonello’s Coma (as strange a pandemic film as any), Jonás Trueba’s You Have to Come and See It (so wise and playful in its portrait of relationships), Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths (a tragicomedic force of nature), Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (one of the most delightful and deserving consensus picks in recent memory), Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door (quietly the cinephile film of the year), Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (more complex and pleasurable than even its proponents typically recognize), Mati Diop’s Dahomey (perfectly balanced and mutable), Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (completely rousing and textured), Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (hilariously piercing in its insights on modern arrangements), Richard Linklater’s Hit Man (best Vertigo riff of the year), Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man (such a treat to see an American independent film with this much complexity and scale), Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts (captures a city and its cinemas with welcome deftness), and Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples (so many of the funniest and best modulated performances of the year). May 2025 bring both just as many strong films and better results in the things and places that matter.