Hello. My name is Davey Peppers and over the course of the insane, gargantuan year that is 2024, I saw a bunch of movies, including 285 that got American releases in this year, which feels like enough pedigree that I can put together a list of the ones that really stood out to me. But first, a couple of notes:

1. I didn’t see everything. I’m only human and I don’t live in NY or LA, so there will not be Nickel Boys or The Brutalist or The Room Next Door or I’m Still Here on this list, as these have not come out in any capacity yet in my area.
2. Documentaries are not ranked on my list because I do not have the knowledge bank to discuss them in a way that I feel is worthy of what they offer, but a special shout out to No Other Land, probably the most important piece of cinema this year, a wonderful and necessary document that I can’t stress enough.

Now let us begin.

25. Manjummel Boys, Dir. Chidambaram

The first of two Malayalam language films on this list and the first of two Indian films on this list overall, Manjummel Boys is a rock-solid meat and potatoes adventure thriller, telling the true life story of a man trapped in a cave and his friends’ attempt to get him out. It’s a movie that knows how to compel, and for 135 minutes, a compelling man-in-cave drama is sometimes all you need.

24. The Wild Robot, Dir. Chris Sanders

So, is this going to be the last good Dreamworks movie? With the studio shipping off most of their productions overseas and the quality steadily decreasing over the past few years, The Wild Robot feels more like a last gasp for an exhausted second-place studio than anything. If that’s the case, it’s a swan song worth singing, more didactic and palatable than the similar Flow that just barely missed this list, but an incredibly moving family picture all the same.

23. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, Dir. Soi Cheang

In a 1980s Hong Kong city that operates more like Arkham City than any sort of respectable place, the greatest strength of Twilight of the Warriors is the incredible production design and location work; that said locations are then annihilated with two hours of spectacular violence is only the cherry on top, an easy and incredibly well put together action epic. “Slightly worse than The Raid” is still a hell of a pitch for a contained martial arts extravaganza.

22. Oddity, Dir. Damian Mc Carthy

Sometimes you just gotta put a wood man in your late sister’s awful husband’s house. With a couple A+ jump scares breaking up a fun, pulpy thriller, Oddity definitely plays to the back row of the theater, and has a wonderful time doing so. This much energy is just infectious sometimes.

21. Rebel Ridge, Dir. Jeremy Saulnier

We’ll get out of pulpy thriller territory soon, I promise. For as much as has been said about Saulnier’s excellent direction and especially Aaron Pierre’s stellar performance in Rebel Ridge, so much has also been said about the film’s perceived lack of catharsis and misplaced “high-road” energy. While I get it, I think that overlooks Rebel Ridge being a furiously angry movie that is smart enough to lock down its script to the point where misinterpretation is impossible. For a movie that was watched as often as this one was by middle-America Netflix users, that’s what you gotta do sometimes. Rebel Ridge does what it has to do.

20. Humanistic Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, Dir. Ariane Louis-Seize

Did the title of this movie make you chuckle? If so you’re on the same wavelength as Humanistic Vampire, a short, sweet comedy that would be a really accessible film for American audiences if it weren’t for the being in French of it all. It’s a surprisingly unpretentious, silly time that’s a great palate cleanser between long, arduous dramas if you’re looking to play catch up with the year’s great films.

19. Kneecap, Dir. Rich Peppiatt

An autobiographical film about how censorship is never a thing of the past and must always be fought, Kneecap tells the story of the titular band’s continued struggle for respect with a reverent amount of flash that does threaten to overwhelm the movie at points, the mastery of Peppiatt’s filmmaking being knowing when to make a movie about the band and when to make a movie about the men. About as honest as a music biopic has ever been with living subjects.

18. I Saw the TV Glow, Dir. Jane Schoenburn

Nobody is doing it like Jane Schoenburn. I know people who will roll their eyes that I Saw the TV Glow is here, I know people who will roll their eyes that it’s not higher, and I know people who will roll their eyes that it’s not #1. The filmmaker’s second feature after the far more esoteric We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a movie that sticks in your brain no matter what strong opinion on it you have, a gorgeously realized and nightmarishly sad odyssey of gender, love, obsession, and being left behind.

17. Love Lies Bleeding, Dir. Rose Glass

About as ambitious as someone can go after breaking out with a talky, pretentious Sundance horror hit (I love Saint Maud), Love Lies Bleeding is part of a trend of this year’s films about violent self-actualization, and may be the most violent one. The body is the center here, a contradictory container for sensuality, violence, and horror. Stewart and O’Brien are wonderful here, trying and compromising to get something out of the world before it inevitably remembers they’re there and snuffs them out like a light. A rousing and consistently exciting film in between all the genuinely super gross stuff.

16. Dídi, Dir. Sean Wang

It’s not easy to be a kid. It’s not easy to be a film kid. It’s not easy to be a film kid in the late 2000s. While I’m a little younger than Sean Wang and his lead character Chris, Dídi is a lightning bolt of nostalgia and cringe comedy told with just enough humility and sincerity to keep it from becoming just a cheap look at what used to be, to say nothing of Joan Chen’s knockout supporting performance.

15. Challengers, Dir. Luca Guadagnino

The far less challenging option of Guadagnino’s pair of 2024 offerings, the steamy-but-not-as-steamy-as-advertised Challengers has the Italian romantic in top form, energetically bouncing between characters, ideas, and scenes like all his reserved and somber films were just storing energy to release in this blinding light. Maybe the only film this year where ‘exhausting’ is a compliment.

14. The Substance, Dir. Coralie Fargeat

The other movie this year where ‘exhausting’ is a compliment, Fargeat’s follow up to the unsubtle Revenge expounds on each of that film’s strengths and a few of its weaknesses to make the funniest 2024 film this side of Trap that leads all roads to an inevitable, chaotic climax of glee. It’s not always about saying something new, sometimes it’s just about saying something loudly, and my god is The Substance loud.

13. The End, Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer

Maybe the most controversial pick on this list, documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s first fiction film, a single-location 2.5 hour musical about a rich family in a bunker 20 years after the end of the world, is…well it’s all that and stars Tilda Swinton (who kind of can’t sing) and George Mackay (who kind of can sing)…if none of this has put you off you might find one of the more powerful meditations on power’s ability to lie to itself, but I do acknowledge that there are a lot of roadblocks with this one.

12. Evil Does Not Exist, Dir. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

I really have to watch that 5 hour movie soon, don’t I? Coming off of what is probably the best movie of 2021, Drive My Car, there’s a slight temptation to see Evil Does Not Exist as a step down in some way, a similarly glacial but less forthcoming film than the unlikely Oscar winner. A meditation on community, capital, and violence, Evil Does Not Exist operates like a great poem, the very title ringing in your ears as you try to decipher what it means in context of the events on screen, scrambling for the grand meaning of Hamaguchi’s film. One of these days I’ll learn to stop scrambling for the grand meaning in his films, because like all the rest, Evil Does Not Exist is about a whole lot more than can be summed up in one sentence, and that’s the most lovely thing about it. And the cinematography.

11. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Dir. George Miller

This one ain’t a meditation on anything, WOOOOOOOOO! Obviously that’s a lie, like every entry in Miller’s series about the wasteland, Furiosa is about so much: narratives, family, trust, identity, violence, and how cool it is when car go fast. These two halves might have a different balance than in other Mad Max entries, Furiosa posing itself more as an operatic tale with wild action than a wild action film with sly narrative ambitions, and I can see how that can lose people…who are WEAK and do not understand the glory of a movie with a character named The People Eater that is also a feminist exploration of how valuable revenge is.

10. Anora, Dir. Sean Baker

I wonder what it’s like to be Mikey Madison right now, knowing with almost pure certainty that she’s about to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. It must be a strange feeling, right? To be so lauded so suddenly and have basically nobody disagree or think that you’ve turned in anything less than one of the defining film performances of the year? I wonder if it makes her think of Ani, the young woman at the center of Anora whose screwball shot at happiness is thrust into the dirt by a world correcting itself. Anora is a movie that keeps giving me things to think about when I think about it, and today it gave me metatext.

9. The Count of Monte-Cristo, Dir. Alexandre de La Patellière & Matthieu Delaporte

A movie so good I might actually read a 200 year old book in 2025, this new version of Dumas’ classic novel really doesn’t seem to miss a single step in making one of the most exciting and breezy 3-hour romps this side of Dune: Part Two. I’m already itching to watch it again, and I might watch a lot of adaptations of Dumas’ novel after being introduced to it with his film. A movie so much fun I think it’s going to make me smarter in the long run.

8. Dune: Part Two, Dir. Denis Villeneuve

Oh hey, Dune: Part Two, we were just talking about you! The blockbuster of 2024 that’ll have not only the longest cultural relevance but hopefully the largest impact on the future of the medium, Dune: Part Two is a four-quadrant hit on accident, a smart, grown-up movie that happens to be PG-13 and about spaceships and Timotheé Chalamet so it makes half a billion, which objectively rules. The best movie your co-worker saw this year.

7. Sing Sing, Dir. Greg Kwedar

To say nothing about the quality of the film, the payment techniques that funded Sing Sing, each contributor from the actors to creatives to crew getting the same pay for their work, feel genuinely revelatory in 2024 in a way populist entertainment like the movies almost never feels. It’s the cherry on top, then that it’s a soulful, gorgeous, red-hot drama with Colman Domingo’s best-of-the-year performance at its center. It’s what the movies are often all about.

6. The Beast, Dir. Bertrand Bonello

After really not vibing with Nocturama as much as everyone else did, it feels good to confidently, 100% join the Bertrand train with a sci-fi historical romantic thriller that I have not been able to get out of my head since the day I saw it. Lea Sedoux and George Mackay are dazzling in their triple roles in The Beast, another 2024 tome of a movie about so many things that it’s foolish to list them all because something will be missed. A movie so good it’s not even that much of a problem that the Red Scare lady is in it.

5. Hit Man, Dir. Richard Linklater

The best of 2024’s “violence will set you free” pictures, the arduous wait for Richard Linklater’s best film since Boyhood paid off in spades with the true arrival of Glen Powell as not just a movie star but a capital A Actor in this surprisingly black-hearted noir comedy about identity, lust, and the power of cultural mistruths. What a nightmare that it’s trapped on Netflix.

4. National Anthem, Dir. Luke Gilford

A true American indie coming-of-age revelation in an era where that sort of thing is nigh impossible without feeling old hat, Luke Gilford’s smart, soulful National Anthem, about a queer ranch in Texas, is a movie I really hope continues to find its audience, because those people could really need it. And also shout out to Charlie Plummer, rocking his third Davey 5-star banger, which never fails to crack me up. Kid’s got a good agent.

3. All We Imagine As Light, Dir. Payal Kapadia

The prettiest movie of the year (and the reason I didn’t start writing this list earlier), All We Imagine as Light is a Malayalam-language masterpiece, heartbreaking and sweet in tandem for 118 minutes that bring to mind the great filmmakers of the 20th century. Slightest by its home country for this year’s Oscars, the legacy of Payal Kapadia’s film might just be forcing western cinephile audiences to start taking Indian cinema more seriously (beyond just RRR).

2. A Different Man, Dir. Aaron Schimberg

The best American film of 2024! My god, is A Different Man both a flashback to the sort of thorny, upsetting comedies we would get in the New Hollywood and Independent booms but also a window into a world where those sorts of films never went out of style. Sebastian Stan delivers a performance many actors spend their whole careers thinking about, Renate Reinsve stuns as usual but in a good movie for the first time since 2021, and Adam Pearson throws the roof off of the whole damn thing in a funny, potentially-sinister turn that leaves you guessing until the devastating final line. What a picture.

1. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Dir. Mohammad Rasoulof

Smuggled out of Iran during a mass cast and crew exodus to Germany while the filmmaker was awaiting a sentencing for the last film he made that pissed off the Iranian government, 2024’s crowning achievement, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, will not change Rasoulof’s standing with his home country. Often an act of genuine revolution, this domestic thriller draws a clear line between masculinity, religion, class, the right to commit violence, and the culture of fear that keeps the powerful powerful and the disenfranchised disenfranchised. The Seed of a Sacred Fig is a universal picture for our time, another spectacular entry in a long line of Iranian filmmakers hitting home runs over the past 20 years, and with 4 amazing performances at its center, one of the most accomplished films of the decade regardless of how it made its way to the global stage.

I hope if you read this you found something worth watching. It’s been a damn good year for the movies, the art form always finding new ways to impress, shock, reinvent, and simply entertain. All my love, now time to count down the seconds until I can see Mickey 17 if it doesn’t get delayed again.