Sarah's Favorite Movies of 2024

Putting last year into perspective.

Nicholas Hoult stands at a crossroads in Nosferatu. Image courtesy of Focus Features.

The films that resonated with me the most in 2024 can best be summed up in a single word: perspective. Even when the plots hit familiar beats—the tense horror of a vampire movie, the rise and fall of a neo-noir love story—I found these stories consistently surprising because of the perspectives from which they were told. At its best, film is an act of collaborative imagination, a way of showing the world as it is and how it could be. These movies reflect that sense of vision; they’re the ones I found the most edifying, challenging, and invigorating.

As with last year, my 2024 list isn’t ranked. Instead, it’s arranged into a film festival of sorts, with each movie in conversation with the ones around it.

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Last Things (dir. Deborah Stratman)

Nonfiction film is so much more than talking-head documentaries, dry recaps of true crime, or breathless beat-by-beat retellings of news stories we’ve heard before. Last Things represents the best of what nonfiction film can be, contemplating the end of human life as we know it. The documentary is told from the perspective of rocks, stitched together from scientific footage, college lectures, and voiceover passages from French science fiction. We learn here that even rocks can go extinct when the conditions that create them no longer exist. All things must end. Stratman finds hope in the ending with her swift and curious documentary, a work of art that gestures toward infinity and leaves us breathless when it’s over.

Nickel Boys (dir. RaMell Ross)

Ross’s film, like Colson Whitehead’s novel, is compassionate and clear-eyed, an honest movie about true injustices done at a fictional “reform school” in Florida. Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray are both keenly aware of how people exist in the world, and of the precious subjectivity that comes from each person’s perspective. Other filmmakers have tried shooting first-person stories before, but no one else has managed to tell a first-person story on film with the grace and nuance that Nickel Boys achieves.

Challengers (dir. Luca Guadagnino)

My favorite script of 2024 was written by newcomer Justin Kuritzkes, who ties his three main characters into a compelling knot over the course of a decade. As in the tennis matches that punctuate their relationship, we bounce backward and forward in time, watching as the characters join and separate and recombine in the past and in the present, each scene serving to underline what we already know about these three people who will do whatever it takes to come out on top. It would be better for everyone involved if they each went their separate ways, but the world of competitive tennis is small, and none of these characters are capable of letting go. “Tennis is a relationship,” says Tashi (Zendaya) to Art (Mike Faist) and Pat (Josh O’Connor). At its best, the sport provides the ability to understand your opponent so completely that you can know them from the other side of the court. I love these three awful people, and I feel like I’ve known them my whole life. They’ll be bouncing around my head for a long time.

I Saw the TV Glow (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)

Schoenbrun captures the mindset of a character who is being dragged against their will into a fuller realization of who they are and the world they live in. This is not a coming-of-age story but instead a refusal of the call to adventure and a fuller life, a horror story about one person’s denial of who they are and the astonishing potential they carry within them. It’s tragic, and sad, and scary, and yet Schoenbrun infuses their film with shards of humor and hope, most memorably embodied in pink chalk on the street that declares, “There is still time.” 

Dahomey (dir. Mati Diop)

Another work of imaginative nonfiction: Diop documents the return of twenty-six stolen artifacts—out of thousands still languishing in museum archives—from France to Benin. She leaves out the paperwork, the negotiations, and the logistics, choosing instead to focus on the artifacts themselves as they’re sealed up into wooden shipping boxes. Her film gives voice to one of the artifacts, which wonders aloud: Why won’t the foreigners call me by name? What will my old-new home be like? This return isn’t a simple transfer of goods from one nation-state to another; it’s a contemplation of the sin of colonialism, a recognition that life goes on in a country that’s been stolen from, that the return of stolen treasures isn’t ever going to be a simple restoration of things back to how they used to be. A complication that refuses easy answers.

Nosferatu (dir. Robert Eggers)

Nosferatu is deceptively simple. It’s a straight remake of the 1922 silent horror classic, a chilling return to an old story made new again through Eggers’s commitment to intensely researched production design and dialogue. The film’s rigid appearance extends to its camera, which remains locked off, framing its subjects in strict profile, or else looking directly into the lens, as though they’re illustrations in a Victorian novel. The film’s intense dedication to a period-correct interpretation of the story frees Nosferatu to become once again strange and frightening. Most uncanny is the film’s notion of love and sacrifice, an act made both unthinkable and beautiful in the same breath.

The Vourdalak (dir. Adrien Beau)

I was unable to resist putting two vampire movies on this list. The Vourdalak is everything Nosferatu is not: loose and emotional, a ’70s grindhouse pastiche soaked in blood and half-focused film grain. The titular monster is a six-foot-tall puppet voiced by the director, an uncanny creature who preys primarily on his family and the people he loves. The film is proof positive that horror movies can be meditations on heavy topics such as death, aging, and abuse while also simply being a gross fun time at the movies.

Love Lies Bleeding (dir. Rose Glass)

Glass’s follow-up to Saint Maud trades the lonely boardwalks of a British seaside town for a rundown gym in the middle of the desert. This is a love story between a bodybuilder (Katy O’Brien) and a shut-in gym manager (Kristin Stewart, doing some of her finest work). It’s also a neo-noir tragedy, told economically through taciturn editing and a blood-red lighting scheme, a morality tale about the ways abuse and revenge warp the world.

Look into My Eyes (dir. Lana Wilson)

Wilson’s documentary about psychics working in Brooklyn works on several different planes of  existence. It’s a movie about people dealing with pain, and also a movie about moviemaking, and also a synthesis between the two—an explanation about why so many people turn to art as a comfort, a balm, a bandage, and a coping mechanism, in both healthy and unhealthy ways. I found myself confronted by my own tendency to run away, to shield myself from my own pain by wrapping myself up in other people’s painful stories. Look into My Eyes interrogates that instinct without judgment or rancor, serving instead as a compassionate witness.

Janet Planet (dir. Annie Baker)

Baker’s film debut is one languid summer told from the perspective of the world’s gravest eleven-year-old as she comes to realize that her extraordinary mother is also a person all to herself. We spend time in Janet’s (Julianne Nicholson) orbit, watching with her daughter Lacey (Zoe Zigler) as newcomers to their house come and go, each one bringing some new soft revelation—and conflict—about who Janet is along with them. It all resolves quietly with my favorite final shot of the year, a look of realization just beginning to dawn on one character’s wistful face. May we all have such powerful epiphanies in the coming year.

Honorable mentions (in no particular order):

Rebel Ridge, Conclave, All We Imagine As Light, Hundreds of Beavers, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Longlegs, The Dead Don’t Hurt, Dune: Part Two, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, The Brutalist, Yintah.