From Wicked to Zone of Interest, from Challengers to All of Us Strangers, these are the best films of 2024

2024 was a big year for the film franchise.

The top-grossing movie of the year was Inside Out 2, collecting almost $US1.7billion worldwide.

The original Inside Out was a gorgeous surprise, an original and tender story that captured kids and grown-ups alike. Nine years later, Inside Out 2 was the first film released under Pixar’s new marketing plan — where every second release from the studio will be a sequel or spin-off. And, as our review found, it shows.

It’s not just a Pixar thing. The box office lists are littered with critically panned films making a whole lot of money. There’s Deadpool & Wolverine ($US1.34b), which we described as ‘a grim march towards brand-compliant obsolescence’; Despicable Me 4 ($US969m); Kung Fu Panda 4 ($US547m) and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes ($US397m). In fact, there are only three original titles in the Top 20 films of 2024: Wicked (adapted from a play, which was adapted from a book), It Ends With Us (adapted, controversially, from a book) and The Wild Robot.

All this to say, it would be easy to think there were no original or inspiring films released this year. But that would be incorrect. There were so many that we had to fight it out to whittle it down to a top 10. Even then, we had to chuck in a few honourable mentions.

So, forget about the franchise and take a look at these sublime offerings that hit our screens this year.

1. La Chimera

In 2024, a sweaty Josh O’Connor proved himself as one of cinema’s most beguiling romantic leads — twice.

In La Chimera — the latest of Alice Rohrwacher’s dreamy neo-realist fables — he played a British archaeologist-turned-grave-robber who roams the Tuscan countryside of the 1980s with a merry gang of tombaroli bandits.

Armed with merely a divining rod and preternatural instincts (his worldly possessions limited to the increasingly grubby white suit on his back), he pinpoints lost Etruscan crypts and their ancient treasures, but remains tormented by visions of lost love. Unable to envision a future, the impoverished thieves exhume the past.

Like its melancholic main character, Rohrwacher’s film traverses different worlds: that of the living and the dead; the black market and the art world; rural poverty and industrial prosperity. La Chimera’s crumbling villages and candlelit tombs are captured in gauzy, grainy frames, with cinematographer Hélène Louvart evoking the sensation of unearthing lost memories.

O’Connor’s performance anchors the film with an adorably embittered demeanour (and a tenuous grasp on the local language), an A-grade grouch blind to the magic around him. Forget the Roman Empire — Etruscan treasures were the year’s most worthwhile obsession.

— Jamie Tram

La Chimera is streaming now on Stan. Read our full review here.

2. May December

Not everyone can pull off a high-wire blend of arch melodrama, pitch-black comedy and devastating emotional punches, but then not everyone is Todd Haynes.

Working from Samy Burch’s incisive, shapeshifting script — itself “loosely” based upon the real-life Mary Kay Letourneau scandal — the Carol director executes a one-of-a-kind portrait of media exploitation, delayed trauma, and the pressing need for more hot dogs, fuelled by a trio of unforgettable lead performances.

That it all got fed into internet discourse once the movie dropped on Netflix — and broke a few people’s brains in the process — only seemed to heighten its prickly, through-the-looking-glass effect.

Charles Melton gives a deceptively complex performance as a man slowly realising he was groomed as a boy, while Julianne Moore — reuniting with Haynes for their best work since 1995’s Safe — is typically brittle as the predator bound to her peculiar version of the truth.

But it’s superstar Natalie Portman — as the parasitic actress who becomes entangled in a Persona-like relationship with the woman she’s playing — who proves to be the real revelation. In a career-best performance, she enacts a slippery pantomime of desire that gradually becomes inseparable from the real thing.

— Luke Goodsell

May December is streaming now on Binge, Foxtel and Prime. 

3. Anatomy of a Fall

If hearing a jaunty instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s classic P.I.M.P. by German funk ensemble Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band doesn’t immediately plunge you back into the depths of twisty murder mystery Anatomy of a Fall, you need to rectify that immediately.

It’s the earworm that backgrounds a formative moment in the life of celebrated German novelist Sandra (played by a masterful Sandra Hüller), who finds herself as a murder suspect after her husband Samuel tumbles to his death from the attic of their remote French chalet. Was it suicide? Or did Sandra push him over in a fit of rage?

Complicating matters is the fact that their visually impaired son, Daniel (played by Milo Machado Graner, with a wisdom belying his years), is called upon as a witness, and Sandra’s hunky old flame, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), is leading her defence.

Anatomy of a Fall is less interested in clear resolutions, and more fascinated with dissecting a marriage through incriminating snippets, the melding of fact and fiction in storytelling, and the presumption of guilt foisted on those who don’t fit into presupposed moulds — specifically messy, imperfect women.

The limitations and incomprehension of language plays a key role in the unfolding events — Sandra is an English-speaking German person forced to speak French in a courtroom. The way language is weaponised against her — both in her relationship and in the murder proceedings — is a fascinating case study in misogyny.

Anatomy of a Fall straddles multiple genres to present an intoxicatingly compelling portrait of gender, culpability and mistruths.

— Sonia Nair

Anatomy of a Fall is streaming now on Stan. Read our full review here.

4. Challengers

“Between tennis and psychoanalysis,” Jean-Luc Godard once said, “I chose tennis.” The late auteur might have been speaking for Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor), two former best friends who thrash out their bitter rivalry — and years of simmering sexual tension — on the tennis court rather than going to therapy in Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s exhilarating reinvention of the sports movie.

No wonder Zendaya’s former-player-turned-pro-trainer Tashi — caught in a love triangle between “her little white boys” — looks so exasperated.

The year’s only film with a sequence shot from the perspective of a tennis ball, Challengers might also be its hottest — a sweaty, sinewy drama of desire and ambition in which you can practically feel the heat sizzling between its lead performers. For a game in which love equals zero, its lust sure is off the charts.

Bouncing between timelines with the speed of a fast ball, Guadagnino’s movie savours a tryst that seems destined to never be resolved, egged on by a playful, pulsing techno soundtrack — courtesy of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — that practically activates itself at random.

One thing’s for certain: after the movie’s climactic showdown, you’ll never look at a tennis ball in the throat of a racquet the same way again.

— Luke Goodsell

Challengers is available to rent or buy online. Read our full review here.

5. I Saw the TV Glow

Director Jane Schoenbrun’s creative ethos is best described in their own words: “The kind of cinema that I really believe in is a cinema that lingers — that says something that’s not as simple as like a moral.”

Initially set in a phosphorescent evocation of 90s suburbia, their breakout film unravelled as an anti-coming-of-age story about an eternal misfit (played by Ian Foreman, then Justice Smith) whose life gradually contorts into a surreal nightmare when an older student (an unforgettable Brigette Lundy-Paine) introduces him to a Buffy-esque fantasy show called The Pink Opaque.

Schoenbrun experiments with genre, time and colour to articulate the unreality of gender dysphoria, drawing upon the delicate relationship we cultivate with the load-bearing media of our youth. True to their MO, Schoenbrun suspends their ideas in a disquieting sense of irresolution; after all, how do you reconcile a life that feels like it’s been lived behind a TV screen?

The film’s hand-picked original soundtrack (featuring the likes of Caroline Polachek and Phoebe Bridgers) is a perfect paean to adolescent ennui, buzzing with breathy vocals, deep-fried synths and unfiltered grunge. Even Martin Scorsese couldn’t help but gush about this film. Like the fictional show at its core, I Saw the TV Glow is destined to become a formative cult obsession. 

— Jamie Tram 

I Saw the TV Glow is in selected cinemas now, and available to rent or buy online. Read our interview with the director here.

6. The Zone of Interest

Political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” to describe how Adolf Eichmann and, by extension, perpetrators of the Holocaust, were not unusual or psychopathic — they were “terribly and terrifyingly normal”.

The epitaph may as well be a shorthand encapsulation of Jonathan Glazer’s eerie, disquieting, stark film The Zone of Interest. A Nazi family frolic in the river and live a life of domestic idyll in the pastoral greenery bordering a concentration camp, even as large gas chambers choke up plumes of smoke that blanket their daily activities and the uncanny rumble of a relentless death factory punctuate their everyday.

Glazer’s tale mostly centres on Rudolf Höss, the real-life commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp (played by an imperious Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig, the proclaimed ‘Queen of Auschwitz’ (played with a chilling cruelty by the incredibly versatile Sandra Hüller, who had a very good acting year).

The timing of this film isn’t lost on Glazer. In his acceptance speech after Zone of Interest won Best International Film at this year’s Oscars, he spoke on behalf of himself and the film’s producers to “refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people” — imbuing the film with a striking resonance.

— Sonia Nair

The Zone of Interest is streaming now on Stan. Read our full review here.

7. Anora

Almost all of Sean Baker’s films (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) have focused on working-class sex workers hustling, but with a refreshing viewpoint that neither glamourises nor sensationalises their lives. The director presents highs, lows and realities often in the same frame.

The Palme-d’Or-winning Anora — the first American film to win since Terrence Mallick’s The Tree of Life in 2011 — is no different, even if it initially feels like Pretty Woman meets Spring Breakers.

Its titular character (Mikey Madison) is a confident, fun-loving, twenty-something stripper with a thick Brooklyn accent working at a club in Manhattan.

As the club’s sole Russian-speaking dancer, Ani looks after Russian clients, including the goofy teenage son of an oligarch, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn). Their chemistry is palpable, and after a whirlwind week, the two elope in Vegas. It’s impossible not to be equally giddy: it’s the most cinematic rom-com you’ve ever seen, complete with stunning slow-motion beaming smiles and its own euphoric theme, an EDM remix of Take That’s ‘Greatest Day’.

But as Vanya’s family pressures for an annulment, the film shifts from Cinderella-story rom-com to Safdie-Brothers-level suspense, to slapstick comedy. Completely unpredictable, Anora slowly builds into something of its own, a complex look at love as transaction that doesn’t labour its points.

Led by an incredible trio — Madison, Eydelshteyn and Yura Borisov, playing a surprisingly sweet henchman hired by Vanya’s parents — Anora is heartbreaking and roaringly funny, often at once.

— Jared Richards

Anora is in cinemas now.

8. A Different Man

The meta, self-reflexive, darkly funny film A Different Man is an absorbing interrogation of identity, disability and the performance of self.

An actor living with neurofibromatosis — a rare genetic disorder that manifests as a spread of benign tumours on his face — Edward (Sebastian Stan) leads a solitary, desolate life, eschewing connections with everyone apart from his new neighbour, the well-meaning but catastrophically problematic playwright Ingrid (Renate Reinsve).

Edward jumps at the chance to try an experimental treatment that would alleviate him of his condition and, when it inexplicably works, he resurrects himself as Guy. His newfangled life is thrown into disarray when he sees Ingrid casting for a play she’s written called Edward, ostensibly based on him.

Auditioning for the role, Guy meets the perennially jovial Oswald (Adam Pearson), an actor who has the same disability Edward did, and who begins to gain favour with Ingrid and the cast as Guy precipitously unravels.

Stan delivers an understated tour de force performance, first as the beleaguered Edward, too mired in his internal maelstrom to live life fully on his own terms, and then as the outwardly different Guy, whose unearthed movie-star features are at odds with the simmering anxieties still broiling underneath.

Stan plays both with a self-diminutive physicality that never abates, while Pearson is effervescent as Oswald, unknowingly tormenting Guy with an effortless confidence that Guy can’t quite emulate, even in his reborn body.

— Sonia Nair

A Different Man is in selected cinemas now, and available to rent or buy online. Read our full review here.

9. All of Us Strangers

Equal parts sexy, sad and strange, this rapturous ghost story re-energised familiar tropes of gay cinema with an exquisite, pained yearning from beyond the corporal realm.

Andrew Scott turned in career-best work as a screenwriter who returns to his hometown seeking inspiration — and discovers his dead parents have mysteriously returned.

It’s a remarkable performance that simmers in self-loathing, but gradually tempers as he’s courted by an irresistibly roguish Paul Mescal, who plays seemingly the only other resident in their apartment complex. In the months since its January release, their erotic chemistry has yet to be surpassed on cinema screens.

Departing from his previous, grounded depictions of contemporary queerness — his 2011 breakout, Weekend, was shot entirely on a consumer digital camera — director Andrew Haigh embraced the story’s spectral sensuality with unforgettable style. The film’s textural landscape of sweat-soaked clubs, crumpled sheets and frothy bathtubs are steeped in expressive lighting. Disorienting camera work blurs metaphysical barriers; repressed shame re-materialises as its own haunting spectre.

For all its richness of style, All of Us Strangers remains startlingly frank in both sincerity and sexuality, avoiding the simpering, self-insert fantasy that its premise suggests. Under Haigh’s assured direction, the film builds to a devastating denouement, crowned by an all-timer of a final shot.

— Jamie Tram

All of Us Strangers is streaming now on Disney+. Read our full review here.

10. Wicked

Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the long-running Broadway smash had some big slippers to fill, faced with the daunting task of pleasing not just musical-theatre kids and enquiring vandals, but the multiple generations for whom The Wizard of Oz remains an enduring classic.

Given all that, it’s almost a miracle that Wicked soars as high as it does, taking the beloved musical and transforming it to meet the scope of the big screen. The world feels more expansive, the emotions deeper, and — in aligning the audience with the perspective of its misfit antagonist — the film has a power that’s electrifying.

Perhaps wisely (if somewhat controversially) eschewing The Wizard of Oz’s Technicolor palette for a more diffuse, digitally playful fantasia, Wicked: Part I doesn’t entirely lean on familiarity — which frees it up to carve out its own identity, despite serving as a prequel to one of the most famous movies of all time.

The fractured friendship between impossibly perky diva Galinda (Ariana Grande) and emerald green queen Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) — aspiring witches who get swept up in the political machinations of Oz — is a surprisingly moving portrait of rivals turned allies and back again. Erivo and Grande are knockouts, with the latter delivering one of the funniest and most purely enjoyable performances of the year.

Oh, and the songs are pretty good, too — but you already knew that.

— Luke Goodsell

Wicked is in cinemas now. Read our full review here.

Honourable mentions

Not all of the films out in 2024 could make the cut, and these ones just fell short. But we wanted to highlight the films that were still original, conversation-starting or had an impact on pop culture in the past year.

The Substance

Love it or loathe it, no movie this year rattled the discourse quite like Coralie Fargeat’s outlandish horror-comedy, The Substance: a skin-shredding parable about a fading Hollywood star (Demi Moore) who spawns a younger, hotter — and, eventually, more monstrous — version of herself (Margaret Qualley) after injecting a black-market miracle elixir.

Was it a daring feminist manifesto about the myriad ways the entertainment industry chews up and spits out women, forcing them into a losing battle with themselves? Was it a heavy-handed satire that trafficked in the very same leering grotesquerie it purported to critique?

The answer, of course, was all of the above, and all part of the pleasure of seeing The Substance in a cinema with a hooting and hollering audience. It was impossible not to admire the rollercoaster performance by Moore, whose smeared-makeup meltdown alone should earn her a lifetime achievement Oscar.

— Luke Goodsell

The Substance is in selected cinemas now, and available to buy and rent online. Read our full review here.

No Other Land

A documentary directed by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of activists, what’s notable about No Other Land is that it was captured in the years before 7 October 2023 — underlining that the long, painful history of dispossession, occupation and onslaughts in the West Bank and Gaza far precedes this date.

Anchored by two unlikely friends and the film’s co-directors — Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and Palestinian lawyer Basel Adra, though he never gets a chance to practise — No Other Land zeros in on West Bank’s southern region of Masafer Yatta.

It documents Israel’s campaign of mass expulsion, demolition of homes and public facilities, and physical violence with painstaking detail, and often at great personal cost to the people behind the cameras.

No Other Land is a devastating must-watch, a crucial record of a human rights crisis transpiring right before our eyes. 

— Sonia Nair 

No Other Land is in cinemas now. Read our interview with the directors here.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Written alongside 2015’s Oscar-winning Mad Max: Fury Road, this prequel was first created as background for its one-armed heroine, Furiosa.

As a result, Furiosa can land more as brand extension than ground breaking. But even if Furiosa retreads emotional territory, Mad Max’s apocalyptic wasteland is far from cinematically barren. Its kill-or-be-killed world is brutal, unrelenting and a spectacle of ever-escalating car chases.

Helming Australia’s biggest and most expensive film to date, director George Miller unleashes every set shot or action premise he could never quite get into the series due to previous budget or tech constraints. It’s a beast.

Plus, Anya Taylor-Joy steps into Charlize Theron’s combat boots and makes Furiosa her own with a roaring anger and minimal dialogue, Chris Hemsworth goes all out as the screwball-terrifying antagonist, and Charlee Fraser’s small role as Furiosa’s mother is a star-making performance.

— Jared Richards

Furiosa is available to rent or buy online. Read our full review here, and our interview with Australian director George Miller here.

Dune: Part Two

In the desert wasteland of this year’s release schedule, Dune: Part Two was a rejuvenating sip from the Water of Life.

Director Denis Villeneuve miraculously made good on the tantalising promises of 2021’s Dune, unleashing a stranger, moodier and even more star-studded epic onto expectant fans. Beyond the gargantuan worms and homoerotic knife fights, it weaved a nuanced narrative about violence blossoming into fascism and tragic, full-scale war.

Dune’s true messiah was Australian DP Greig Fraser, who demonstrated that black-and-white can be infinitely richer than our current glut of de-saturated, poorly lit blockbusters. In several decades, we’ll look back and wonder: how did they get away with making this film?

— Jamie Tram

Dune: Part Two is available to stream on Netflix, Binge and Foxtel. Read our full review here.

Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project — which he poured US $120m of his own money into making — isn’t for everyone. It might even be generous to say it’s ‘good’.

But if, like me, you’re into fascinating failures — or argue that Southland Tales is a misunderstood masterpiece — it’s a must-watch.

The logline? An idealistic architect (Adam Driver, fully committing) attempts to transform a fictional New Rome into a utopic paradise. But the plot’s a complete mess. And yes, performances are at complete odds with one another (a manic Aubrey Plaza is a highlight). And it has the visual language of a nu-metal music video.

But it’s also daringly extravagant and delightfully baffling. At its heart, it’s a deeply earnest and, if you let it, touching film about legacy, ambition and the limits of art to change a corrupt world. It’s also potentially the last film from one of our greatest auteurs.

— Jared Richards

Megalopolis is showing in selected cinemas, and is available to rent or buy online. Read our full review here.