Join us for this countdown of our favourite 2024 movies, and find something to add to your watchlist.
20 writers, 20 lists. 100 movies. A mindboggling 11,302 minutes of viewing time. Man, are we gluttons for punishment… Somehow we took our writers’ varied and numerous picks and came up with this highly subjective list of the year’s twenty best movies. Read on and find out where you agree or disagree with our top twenty of 2024, a list that includes movies we saw at film festivals, general cinema release or streaming.
In putting this top twenty list together, our writers were asked for a list of at least ten movies, with 100 points to allocate across their picks (and a maximum of 40 points per film). With the resulting lists aggregated into one, this methodology allowed our writers to champion the movies in cinemas or on streaming this year that they felt most passionate about, and the results reflect a great year of movie-watching—with plenty of recommendations for readers.
Not all of these movies may technically be 2024 titles—but territorial release dates and film festival appearances mean that 2024 was when they left a mark on us. Where possible, each entry quotes from Flicks coverage published at release time.
Best-of lists contributed by: Amelia Berry, David Michael Brown, Luke Buckmaster, Dominic Corry, Rory Doherty, Adam Fresco, Matt Glasby, Vicci Ho, Eliza Janssen, Annabel Kean, Liam Maguren, Steve Newall, James Nokise, Katie Parker, Amanda Jane Robinson, Stephen A Russell, Daniel Rutledge, Fatima Sheriff, Tony Stamp, and Sarah Thomson.
When you’re done here, you can also check out our 20 favourite shows of 2024.
20. Hundreds of Beavers
In this chaotic comedy (and silent supernatural winter epic) a drunken applejack salesman must go from zero to hero and become North America’s greatest fur trapper to defeat hundreds of beavers—and survive both the wilderness and the father of a woman he’s trying to impress.
Made on a shoestring budget, but with no shortage of absurdity, it channels everything: “from Buster Keaton to Johnny Knoxville, Looney Tunes to The Fabulous Baron Munchausen,” writes Liam Maguren in You’ve never seen a film like Hundreds of Beavers: “The film not only gives the gift of constant belly laughs, it also provokes the feeling of deep satisfaction watching all its chaotic elements come together.”
19. The Iron Claw
The Iron Claw
The wrestling world’s tragic “Von Erich Curse” gets retold in subtle, melancholic detail by director Sean Durkin (The Nest), who assembles a great cast including Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson and Stanley Simons to bring the true story to life. Durkin’s affinity for finding subtly expectation-subverting approaches to drama in his films is evident once again, the “sports movie” template getting a more rounded, measured and emotional outing here.
“The family may be cursed. But by what exactly?” ponders Luke Buckmaster’s review: “The answer may lie in another suggestion, inferred rather than spoken: that this is perhaps a narrative about sons trapped inside their father’s dreams. If it’s not also about toxic masculinity, it’s in an adjacent space, gently skewering passé notions of manhood.”
18. The Wild Robot
This animated pic from DreamWorks (showing more resources than the beaver pic mentioned above) follows an abandoned robot shipwrecked on an uninhabited, heavily forested island. As she becomes the unexpected protector to an orphaned gosling, together they struggle to survive the harsh environment alongside a close-knit group of misfit animals.
As Liam Maguren says in their feature Dreamworks is making death fun again(?!) “It doesn’t fully escape feeling like bumper sticker morals typical of mainstream family films, but that gooey softness complements nicely with the film’s edgier aspects”.
17. Menus-Plaisirs, les Troisgros
Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros
Frederick Wiseman’s latest observational documentary is a meditative four-hour look inside a three-Michelin-star French fine dining institution. At turns meditative, humourous, and fascinating, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros has some surprising digressions to producers of beef, cheese, wine and so on, which show how interlinked a restaurant can be with those around it.
As I wrote after seeing the film at this year’s NZ International Film Festival: “Sits interestingly alongside heightened chef dramas like The Bear, or modern ‘food porn’ by seldom showing us inflamed egos—or “beauties” (as Top Chef calls the perfectly lit shots of individual dishes presented to camera on the show). Like most Wiseman, this is about the institution, and the people who make it—and there’s a lot revealed in its patient runtime.”
16. Monkey Man
Monkey Man
A man named Kid is out to avenge his mother in action flick Monkey Man—along the way, kicking butt and standing up for everyone pushed to the margins by India’s elite. Starting the film in an underground fighting ring, Kid works his way up the ladder at a high-end night club for the rich and powerful, gaining more and more access to the evils within and biding his time to strike… First-time feature director Dev Patel also leads the film, proving as adept at shaping the action on screen as he is at dishing out (and taking) an array of physical punishment.
As Katie Smith-Wong enthuses in their review: “Behind the camera, his visuals feel unrefined but intimate, daring to bare the soul of Monkey Man’s sordid settings and its protagonist to show a raw directing skill that compensates for the film’s inconsistencies in pacing and tone.”
15. Poor Things
Poor Things
Poor Things could easily have slipped through the cracks of this list—releasing in cinemas too late for last year’s countdown (Boxing Day in Australia, New Year’s Day in NZ) and cleaning up at the 2024 Academy Awards earlier this year, it does feel very much in the rearview (even more so with director Yorgos Lanthimos regrouping with some of its stars for Kinds of Kindness, released mid-2024). Bigger and bolder than the filmmaker’s previous efforts, it leant into sumptuous worldbuilding and even a sense of optimism we wouldn’t typically associate with Lanthimos—but more than anything else, it came with a bravura Emma Stone performance that joins The Curse in showcasing some of the most unexpectedly superb work of her career.
Lanthimos’ mastery of tone is present throughout, even as he subverts expectations. As Katie Smith-Wong’s review notes: “Whether it is Bella fiddling with a flaccid penis or an argument in a dancehall that becomes a melee of awkward dancing, a scene that would normally shock audiences instead becomes hysterical—and Poor Things has plenty of these scenes.”
14. Rap World
Rap World
You’d be forgiven if this one passed you by—a sub-one-hour found-footage mockumentary from cult (ie pretty obscure) comedian Conner O’Malley. If you’re asking “Conner who?”, Tom Augustine wrote a great primer on where to start with O’Malley’s hilariously unconventional comedy. Set in 2009 and shot on video cameras available at the time, a group of friends set out to record a rap album and document the process—which is inevitably sidetracked. Augustine called it “a cutting portrayal of white suburban malaise packaged within an incredibly funny ‘night-gone-wrong’ saga”—and isn’t wrong when he says “it might just be the funniest movie of the year.”
Where can you watch it? Right here:
13. Fallen Leaves
Fallen Leaves
Taking its sweet time to reach cinemas mid-year after doing the festival circuit in 2023, Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki delivers a deadpan romantic dramedy that offers glimpses of hearts throbbing and aching beneath its characters’ stoic surfaces. Jury Prize winner at Cannes 2023, it sees supermarket shelf-stocker Ansa and alcoholic sandblaster Holappa enter each other’s orbit—both at low ebbs emotionally and on the lower rungs of barely survivable capitalism. Despite the hardships they endure, and the familiar ache of loneliness Kaurismäki conjures, there’s an understated optimism that dares to dream just out of reach.
12. Memoir of a Snail
Showcasing another distinctly different take on animation from the other films already on this list, this Australian stop-motion pic (featuring the voices of Sarah Snook, Jacki Weaver, Eric Bana and Nick Cave) is the bittersweet life story of melancholic woman who surrounds herself with snails, romance novels, and guinea-pigs.
Hoarding, feeder relationships and obesity, conversion therapy, dementia, anxiety, key parties… It’s not what you call standard family fare—which as David Michael Brown learned in an interview with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Adam Elliot, poses no problem: “I certainly had no interest in making films for children, but then I also wanted to make comedies too, so I knew that I was going to head into either dark comedies or comedy tragedies, but then also I wanted to tell stories about my family. So, I came up with this pretentious word, clayographies, which is now on Wikipedia, which I’m so thrilled about.”
11. Longlegs
“Blessed” with both an intense focus bordering on the unhealthy and an intuition so powerful it borders on the supernatural, rookie FBI agent Harker (Maika Monroe) is assigned to a decades-long case investigating gruesome family murder-suicides—connected by coded letters signed “Longlegs”, despite bearing no evidence of a perpetrator other than the family members. Involved, of course, is the titular character, brought to life by Nicolas Cage going maybe as OTT as we’ve ever seen him, even in the boldest of his performances.
As I said in my review: “It’s to Longlegs’ credit not only that a performance this unhinged can sit within its deliberately drably-depicted world and painstakingly executed sense of dread, but its overtly unhinged elements makes the film even scarier. What’s the character capable of, Cage’s turn asks? And what other transgressions—of morals, science, religion or movie rules—can Longlegs the character or Longlegs the film break?
10. Evil Does Not Exist
Drive My Car director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi returns with this drama, following a community living in relaxed harmony with nature, whose way of life and relationship with the environment are threatened by a real estate development: A glamping retreat, of all horrors. As the project is fast-tracked (hmm) by developers, a single father finds himself caught up in this intrusion, as gentle symbiosis threatens to give way to “progress”.
“From the widower opposing the fast-tracked glamping development that threatens the town, to the hapless corporate stooges sent to charm the residents into compliance, director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi casts no one as a hero or a villain,” wrote Katie Parker in our coverage of NZIFF 2024. “Paired with a gorgeous soundtrack and stunning photography, this sense of generous empathy creates a gentle, hypnotic rhythm—one that is nevertheless always tinged with dread.”
9. Love Lies Bleeding
Love Lies Bleeding
Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian star in this superb and steamy sophomore pic from Saint Maud director Rose Glass, an off-the-rails love story serving a slice of queer noir with plenty of extras—not least of all, an impressive collection of muscles. They’re essential to the plot, which sees K-Stew’s gym manager (and daughter of a crime family) fall in love with bodybuilder O’Brian, new in town and working out en route to a competition in Las Vegas.
“This movie is a good goddamned time,” declares Eliza Janssen’s review, which elsewhere calls it: “A venal, juicy delight to savour. Even when it becomes tonally messy, Glass indulging in all the nightmarish desire and delusion that was so restrained in Saint Maud.”
8. Perfect Days
Wim Wenders’ heartfelt slice-of-life peek into the daily work and pleasures of a Tokyo public toilet cleaner resonates long after viewing, a moving reflection on finding beauty in simplicity. Re-reading these words, I find myself agreeing with those of Liam Maguren in the introduction to his interview with Wenders: “A basic synopsis can’t capture the magic Wenders conjures with Perfect Days. As the film washes over you, it’s hard not to feel swept up in, and even envious of, Hirayama’s joyfully minimalist life. It’s even harder to witness the maximalist world around him threatening to topple this beautiful balance he’s created for himself.”
During their conversation, Wenders reflects on working with Koji Yakusho, who he describes as one of the greatest actors living on the planet: “It was so beautiful to work like this. Every now and then we did a second take other than the rehearsal, but basically, when he was alone, we shot only once. It felt like we were doing a documentary on a fictional man.”
7. Rebel Ridge
Rebel Ridge
The latest from director Jeremy Saulnier (the excellent Blue Ruin and Green Room) is a must-watch action thriller that sees tension, anger and adrenaline simmer from the get-go. Knocked off his bike by small-town cops and legally(?) relieved of a wad of cash he needs to bail out his cousin, Terry (star-in-the-making Aaron Pierre) goes up against a crooked police department headed by Don Johnson in an effort to make things right. Spoiler: it’s not that easy.
As I wrote in my review of the film, “Measured, confident, and blessed with fantastic performances, this is a superb new film from the ever-reliable Saulnier. And there’s something to look forward to—he’s already talking about working with Aaron Pierre again.”
6. The Substance
Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley star in a perverse Hollywood fairy tale that sees a TV fitness instructor combat the impact of aging on her career by using “The Substance”—offering the best version of herself, but to unimagined consequences… Split into older and younger versions of herself, with strict rules about switching back and forth, soon things are spiraling out of control in this satirical body horror.
The film proved polarising—at Flicks, too. Rory Doherty’s review observes: “It considers the audience unable to grasp its simplest points, but desperately wants them to grant it modern cult status, and compensates with a volume of splatterific practical FX that sometimes feels misguidedly deployed.”
On the other hand, Luke Buckmaster writes: “I think this film will come to be regarded as a modern classic—a status that some productions accrue almost instantly.”
5. Dune: Part Two
Director Denis Villeneuve returned to finish (well, not quite) the sci-fi spectacle he started, reuniting with a stacked cast led by Timothée Chalamet—and with new faces including Christopher Walken, Florence Pugh, Austin Butler and Léa Seydoux. Picking up from the abrupt ending of the previous chapter, and jumping right in with perhaps one of the two-parter’s best-staged and most tense action sequences, Villeneuve’s love and attentiveness for the source material pairs wonderfully with his craftmanship, in what’s the best example of big studio mega-budget IP adaptation this year. Damning with faint praise there, I know, but it’s #5 on this list for a reason (just perhaps not its ending/not-an-ending).
As Matt Glasby says in a spoiler-lite review, the movie’s “a staggering achievement; a stirring piece of grown-up sci-fi delivering more spectacle than you’d see in several ordinary blockbusters stitched together.”
4. No Other Land
No Other Land
Award-winning documentary No Other Land depicts the destruction of Palestinian villages by Israel and the grim realities of life under armed occupation in the West Bank. Preceding the murderous Hamas attacks on Israel of October 7 2023 and the brutal IDF reprisals and probable war crimes that have followed, this offers awful context to the plight of ordinary people in the Occupied Territories, set against a very different landscape to the urban (now man-made) ruins of Gaza.
As Stephen A Russell writes in his interview with No Other Land’s Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra and Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham: “Alongside the severing of water pipes and wells filled in with cement, watching the Israeli army (IDF) destroy a school hand-built by the illegally occupied West Bank community of Masafer Yatta is the most distressing image in shattering documentary No Other Land. Combined, these inhuman acts are designed to erase the future.”
“People must understand that this is unnormal, that this is insane and they should be against it,” Basel Adra told Flicks. “When you live in this situation, you either choose to be silent or pay a price. My father chose not to be silent. I am proud that they raised me this way.”
3. Challengers
Challengers
Jumpy chronological pacing and hard-to-like characters would be an issue in most films. Not so, Luca Guadagnino’s entertaining tennis love triangle Challengers (starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist), though… It’s a total blast, and so’s the Reznor/Ross score to boot (though Guadagnino’s lyrics to the award-nominated Compress / Repress approach parody). One of the year’s horniest movies, it’s also one of the best, bouncing (sorry) along as it traces desire to win on and off the court.
It’s not about the sport itself, as the director told Little White Lies: “Hey, I’m going to say something that I shouldn’t say, but I’m not a great tennis watcher. I don’t watch tennis matches. It’s quite boring to me.”
Luke Buckmaster’s review celebrates the film’s energy: “It’s almost like Guadagnino is saying: films don’t need people to root for; you can root for the film itself. And what a hoot it is. There’s an aspect of European, perhaps even anti-Hollywood sentiment in Challengers, but it’s not the kind of experience multiplex audiences will find too distancing and cerebral. This is a charming, feisty film, that goes down easy and has some kick to it, like a spritzy summer cocktail.”
2. I Saw the TV Glow
A visually stunning film about loners connecting over their shared love for a cult TV show gives way to something much deeper and emotionally resonant in I Saw the TV Glow, which I called a lock for end-of-year best movies lists back when it played film festivals. This visually stunning film about loners connecting over their shared love for a cult TV show gives way to something much deeper and emotionally resonant—Owen and Maddy are brought together by late-night airings of The Pink Opaque, but it’s a closeness that leaves Owen adrift when his friend disappears.
This A24 smash has the heart to match its auteurist contemporary queer Lynch-y leanings, buoyed by an Alex G score and a soundtrack including the likes of Caroline Polachek, Phoebe Bridgers and Snail Mail.
It’s the best kind of personal film, says Rory Doherty’s review: “A transmission directly from filmmaker to the audience member who needs it the most”.
1. The Zone of Interest
Multiple Oscar winner The Zone of Interest sees director Jonathan Glazer explore life over the wall from the mass exterminations of Holocaust concentration camp Auschwitz. Filmed around the camp itself, the film examines how human beings can go about their daily lives, with all their small setbacks and victories, jokes and rivalries, while participating in the utterly, unimaginably, inhumane.
It’s a vital addition to the Holocaust film canon, but also much more than that. The Zone of Interest joins Joshua Oppenheimer’s also-excellent 2012 documentary The Act of Killing in inviting us to consider all those working in service of dehumanisation—whether its overt acts of mass murder as we are seeing in the Middle East today, or perhaps more closer to home in the degradation of services and standard of life provided to citizens of governments intent in extending the gap between the haves and have-nots.
These are thoughts to brew long after the film, though. After a protracted black screen intro prompts us to cast off our daily concerns, we are face-to-face with life next to repugnant horror for the runtime (or, at the very least, with those trying valiantly not to face the reality of what they are doing to millions of Jews).
“Everything the characters do, however mundane, doubles and redoubles in significance because of where and when they are doing it,” says Matt Glasby’s review: “While Höss worries away at the business of mass extermination with his colleagues, Heddie tends her garden, perhaps the ultimate act of barbarism, especially as its soil is sown with ash from the furnaces.”
A masterpiece.
One you’ll never, ever shake—and never should.
