The Best Movies of 2024: Honorable Mentions & Editors' Choice
Every year as we construct our Top 10 list, we think: Man. There’s so many good movies. Even though this Top 10 is irrefutable and sacrosanct, it is a shame there’s only 10 spots.
Enter: Our Honorable Mentions and Editors’ Choice picks. We have for you five Honorable Mentions showcasing the breadth in cinema 2024 had to offer, from self-distributed slapstick to big-budget Lego documentaries (?), all highlighted by five fantastic contributors.
We also have, hot off the editors’ desk (we all share one cartoonishly big desk), a selection of films from this year that our editorial team felt deserved some shine.
If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out our Best of 2024: Top 10 List! And without further ado, here is our 2024 Best of: Honorable Mentions and Editors’ Choice List.
Honorable Mentions
Hundreds of Beavers
It's a thrill to see one of my closest friends, Mike Cheslik, deliver the most original and acclaimed independent film of the year. Mike has been pushing the limits of narrative comedy for years, and all of his prior work comes to a head in his one-of-a-kind masterpiece Hundreds of Beavers. Human cartoon Ryland Brickson Cole Tews plays Jean Kayak, a 19th-century applejack salesman and fur trapper mired in a never-ending battle against beavers (played by human actors in animal mascot costumes). Beavers is a black-and-white, dialogue-free film (though hardly silent, with its stupendous sound design by Bobb Barito) - an absolutely unhinged fusion of slapstick comedy, Saturday morning cartoons, and video games topped with a splash of Guy Maddin and The Simpsons (at one point, Jean Kayak has the misfortune of getting the Lionel Hutz of beaver lawyers). Mike has said that micro-budget filmmakers can't compete with studio movies, so his films have to look and feel like something else entirely - in other words, the work has to be noticeably indie. Hundreds of Beavers has become a sensation precisely because there's absolutely nothing else that looks, sounds, or feels like it in the cinema climate today. – Jack Kyser
Problemista
I’ve recommended Julio Torres’ Problemista to friends and strangers throughout 2024. People always seem surprised when I rave about it. I’m not exactly sure why — Torres’ track record is solid! The former SNL writer created memorable sketches like “Papyrus” and its recent sequel. Problemista, his feature directorial debut, follows Alejandro (Torres), an aspiring toy maker from El Salvador, as he attempts to realize his dream and find a work visa sponsor in New York City. Enter Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), a high-strung and impulsive former art critic who at first serves as yet another obstacle to Alejandro’s success. Their relationship plays out like a surreal version of Devil Wears Prada with a twist: Alejandro cannot legally earn an income until he gets a sponsor. Scenes that function as mini-sketches vividly portray Alejandro's financial struggles — in one, he faces off against a bank teller on the phone after his cash deposit was “flagged as potentially fraudulent,” causing an overdraft. The story is not as bleak as it sounds: Torres fills the world of his film with colorful sets, imagination, and humor. Problemista is an original film about the American dream, art, and friendship, with a cryogenic subplot mixed in for good measure. – Tiffany Kelly
Piece by Piece
It’s easy to write off Piece by Piece as a confusing animated puff piece about one of the greatest record producers of all time, but that’s only until you have a chance to see the movie. Animated documentaries have been done before but never in the form of LEGO, so when Pharrell Williams asked director Morgan Neville if they could take a risk, his response came with a perplexed enthusiasm. What these two crafted together may perhaps be one of the strangest movies to be released this year, but it’s the tact and care with which both the subject matter and LEGO animation are done that really makes it stand out. It’s funny in ways you wouldn’t expect a documentary to be, genuine and heart-filled. The recreations of popular music videos from the 2000s onward remind you that while you may not really have been aware of it, Pharrell has been running the music game for years with no signs of slowing down. Plus you get to see LEGO Pusha T sell LEGO crack, and LEGO depictions of God, so yeah that’s pretty cool too. – Blake Williams
Seeking Mavis Beacon
Maybe it’s because I am pushing 30 and vehemently proclaiming Gen Z (I am wearing silver chains, baggy jeans, and twisting my septum ring as I type this), so I feign having a short attention span, but Seeking Mavis Beacon is a huge departure from the stuffy tech docs I have come to expect.
The directorial debut from Jazmin Jones tackles the relatively undefined intersection of race, sex, gender, and computer science. Internet videos and interviews with software engineers are interpolated with personal anecdotes from Black femmes and sexy needle drops with the use of surreal editing that makes one feel as if they are trapped in the most aesthetic theme of their favorite Tumblr blog. There is also a true crime/western vibe as Jazmin and Olivia traverse across the country in a convertible investigating the whereabouts of their heroine. More broadly, this documentary focuses on the ethics and inherent contradictions of documentary-making and evolving technologies.
Personally, I am especially touched by the friendship and individual journeys of our two investigators. Mavis Beacon, the person, does not exist. How do they reconcile the fact that their lifelong heroine is actually an online avatar used to sell software? Admittedly, this is a very ambitious film, and if you don’t get it…well…you’ll never get it. – Aja Nicely
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Chekhov’s missing gun brings a family to its knees as trust and freedom are eviscerated in pursuit of a firearm. The Seed of the Sacred Fig serves as a damning warning for how modern monsters are molded from the men we once knew as family. A father is promoted within the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, but his new job just adds to the pressure that keeps building in the family’s powder keg of a home as the disorder of the outside world begins to erase any order he maintains in his family.
Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof lives in exile after receiving an 8-year prison sentence for making this film, which he managed to pull off in secret. By including real footage of Iranian protests and unrest (the daughters often scroll past shocking videos on their phones), Rasoulof adopts a documentarian’s angle to ground this tale in a bleak reality. The experience leaves you pretty rattled, but you shouldn’t miss one of the more important pieces of recent filmmaking in this tense thriller. - Evan Glass
Editors’ Choice
Madame Web
It would be very easy to completely mock this film, to treat it purely as a punching bag. I see the temptation to burn it at the stake as a wicker man, symbolic of the current era of studio excess and visible disdain for an audience's time and energy. The villain's mouth is almost never on screen, leading to the most egregious use of ADR I've seen in a film outside of some giallos; Sydney Sweeney almost seems determined to beat the allegations that she's a good actress; the plot and scene-to-scene choices are so confusing as to almost explicitly require ADR-additions just to help the audience follow along.
And yet, I have nothing in my heart but love for this film. I adore it in all its misshapen, broken mess; I have only an affectionate protectiveness for it, not judgment. It is a film that is a film and that's all it could ever be. Made by humans, poorly, created for crass and financial goals, visibly, and released to a public who could only hiss and mock it. It is exactly what it is, and I love it dearly. – Ziah Grace
Nickel Boys
In a world where we’ve become an audience for the endless slop, shoveled into our pigstys by our malevolent media overlords, it’s a major coup for a movie to leave you emotionally shell-shocked. For 30 minutes after seeing RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s book of the same name, I sat in my car thinking about what I’d just seen on screen: Jomo Fray’s immersive, almost tangible cinematographic work; the leads Ethan Cole Sharp and Brandon Wilson, who inhabit the two teenage boys at the heart of the story with ease, despite a difficult approach to perspective; the score composed by Scott Alario and Alex Somers, which brings an uneasy tenor the film.
With his first feature film, following his debut documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross gives us more than a rehash of the novel. He plays with time, space, perspectives, and viewpoints, weaving a nonlinear narrative into a labyrinth of filmmaking that still retains the emotional core of its predecessor. It’s a credit to Ross’s artistry that the way he bends the rules never comes across as gimmicky; instead, it feels like a new definition of storytelling. Nickel Boys is challenging in all the right ways, executing that rare feat of prioritizing both form and content in equal measure. – Alix Mammina
Trap
I’m not afraid to admit I’m an M. Night Superfan. And Trap is the perfect M. Night Shyamalan movie. He’s pulled out all of his best tricks to deliver a truly thoughtful examination of fatherhood, of family, told through the eyes of a serial killer who's having what is, frankly, A Real Bad No Good Day. It’s also fitting that one of his best films is one he made in collaboration with his daughter, Saleka.
That Shyamalan has been largely reduced to a punchline in the wrathful eye of popular culture is a damn tragedy. Trap proves his filmmaking finesse and more, from how he artfully builds suspense within the raucous frenzy of what is, essentially, a Taylor Swift concert, to his ability to connect us emotionally to a guy who’s actively torturing a dude in his basement. It’s also really, really, really funny, carried by a phenomenal performance from Josh Harnett as the obsessively in-control-until-he-isn't-father-slash-monster. It’s a beautiful evolution of Shyamalan’s core competencies, and I can’t wait to see what he does next. – remus jackson
All We Imagine As Light
In her debut narrative feature, Payal Kapadia opens with a series of images of Mumbai city as it is seen now: bathed in blue, humid, and bustling. It is a bridge that connects her previous nonfiction work to her new venture. Kapadia captures Mumbai not through a glamorous lens, but one overflowing with affection and an understanding of the people who live, work and leave the city.
All We Imagine As Light follows three women at different crossroads in their lives as they live and work at a hospital in Mumbai: Anu (Divya Prabha), a young and vibrant girl in the midst of a scrutinized romance with a Muslim boy, Prabha (Kani Kusruti in the best performance of the year), a woman repressing fledgling desires after her extended estrangement from her absent husband, and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), an older woman reaching the end of her time in the city.
Kapadia shifts from tender and poignant to sensual, before finally arriving at a surreal, contemplative finale. A masterwork in framing and mood, All We Imagine As Light is a tremendous, romantic portrait of the isolations experienced by living in an ever-moving, shifting place and overcoming cultural conventions. – Joshua Bippert
La Chimera
While many were understandably captivated by Joshua O’Connor’s performance in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, his leading turn in another Italian director’s film floored me and stands out as the most poetic and poignant film of the year. Released in the States just weeks before Challengers, the magical neorealism masterpiece La Chimera from Alice Rohrwacher features O’Connor in the contemplative, tender role as a rundown archaeologist Arthur. He spends his days looting graves in search of prized Etruscan artifacts with a band of local tombaroli, reminiscing on his past days with his inexplicably lost love, Beniamina. Arthur remains lost in his past and unconcerned with the future, wandering aimlessly through tombs of the long deceased, taking pieces of their history with him. The film deftly contemplates life and death, the past and present, and those who find themselves trapped in the in-between. Evoking a sense of folktale storytelling, La Chimera becomes mythic in its own right, examining a hero’s journey back to love and life. – Gabrielle Sanchez
A Complete Unknown
A Complete Unknown does not feel much different from other accursed biopics—the rags-to-riches portrayal, a predictable montage of triumph, the tragic flaw, and the diabolical text epilogue. But Bob Dylan has faith in Timothée Chalamet and so do I. Yes, Chalamet gets right the perpetually indifferent, jerkish attitude Dylan is known for. But how he chaotically affects the supporting characters is much more interesting than seeing Paul Atreides be a misunderstood jerk.
There’s an interesting buildup to “Like a Rolling Stone” that is executed far better than “Bohemian Rhapsody” in Bohemian Rhapsody—that is enough to inspire my choice for this year’s editor mentions. Every year, I advocate more and more for less biopics, but when I am charmed, I’m charmed. Whether it makes me detest Dylan for his abhorrent persona or adore him for his genius, A Complete Unknown is much less Walk the Line and more Ford v. Ferrari and I kind of appreciate that. Overall, don’t trust biopics, but give James Magold’s latest Oscar bait a teeny, tiny chance. Maybe you’ll be surprised. – Manny Madera
Red Rooms
In a year full of lush coming-of-age films set at summer’s fever pitch (Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, India Donaldson’s Good One), let us sing the praises of Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, a shrewd little crime thriller tuned to the meanness of Montreal winter. Like Janet Planet and Good One, Red Rooms centers on a young woman; unlike these films, it never invites us to know her. What we learn of Kelly-Anne (played to sleek perfection by Juliette Gariépy and Juliette Gariépy’s high ponytail), we learn early on: she’s a model, a techie, and a loner. She’s also a watcher.
Red Rooms opens on the trial of a serial killer who has been accused of broadcasting three girls’ murders on the dark web, via the titular “red rooms.” As we watch attorneys describe the brutal case, Plante’s patient camera homes in on Kelly-Anne, seated in the courtroom. Kelly-Anne is not watching the attorneys, nor the killer, though at first it may seem so. Gaze as fixed as the sights on a sniper, Kelly-Anne is watching us. From there, the film gambles our attention on a rationed economy of dread, probing spectatorial pleasure while staunchly refusing easy revelations. It wins. As Kelly-Anne befriends a serial-killer groupie, and then begins to seek the trial’s one missing snuff film herself, our failure to understand her need to see is offset by our own. Of all the great films I saw this year, this one sat with me the longest for the trenchant simplicity of its premise, recalled all the more fully by the cinephilic fervor of year-end lists and best-ofs. It is hard to watch, Red Rooms says. But it’d be harder to look away. – Jadie Stillwell