As much as theaters are humming right now, with “Wicked” and “Moana 2” bringing moviegoers by the droves, it’s been a fairly bruising movie year.
In between the blockbusters, though, the challenge of not just capturing the attention of audiences but of simply getting to the screen feels more perilous than ever. The year was marked by filmmakers who wagered everything from a $120 million pile ( Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” ) to their life (the dissident Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”).
Considering the paths of the “The Apprentice” (about Donald Trump’s rise in New York) or the Israeli occupation documentary “No Other Land” (which still lacks a distributor), the question of what gets released was a common and chilling refrain.
That also made the movies that managed their way through — the ones that told urgent stories or dazzled with originality at a time of sequel stranglehold — all the more worth celebrating.
Here are picks for the best movies of 2024:
1. “Blitz”
1. “Blitz”
Steve McQueen tells a different kind of World War II story in “Blitz,” a powerful and clear-eyed odyssey through London during the German bombing raid. Structured around a 9-year-old boy (Elliott Heffernan) trying to make his way back to his mother (Saoirse Ronan), it is a sneakily revolutionary glimpse into and poignant elegy for worlds unexplored and stories untold. Streaming on Apple TV+.
2. “All We Imagine As Light”
2. “All we imagine as light”
Was this a great year for movies? The consensus seems to be no, and that may be true. But it did produce some stone-cold masterpieces, none more so than Payal Kapadia’s sublime tale of three women in modern Mumbai. It’s a grittily real movie graced, in equally parts, by keen-eyed documentary and dreamy poetry. Beguilingly, “All We Imagine As Light” grows more profound as it cleaves further from reality. In theaters.
3. Immaculate
It’s not your imagination: Sydney Sweeney has been everywhere this year. In the past months, she’s been in a romantic comedy that turned into a sleeper hit, a superhero movie that didn’t and a bloody horror. “Immaculate,” in which she brilliantly plays a young American nun, Cecilia, who’s decided to join an Italian convent. Her character found God after a near-death experience at a young age and, after her parish closes, she gets a lifeline to go abroad and help tend to older, dying nuns. The prettiness of the new surroundings is just a front, and she starts to discover some sinister happenings within the ancient walls.
4. “I Saw the TV Glow”
4. “I saw the TV glow”
Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature — a dramatic leap forward for filmmaker and a transfixing trans parable — is a chilling 1990s coming of age in which a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like series called “The Pink Opaque” offers a possible portal out of drab suburban life and other suffocations. It feels chillingly, beautifully ripped out of Schoenbrun’s soul — and it’s got a killer soundtrack. Streaming on Max, available for digital rental.
5. “Green Border”
5. “Green border”
The fury of Agnieszka Holland’s searing migrant drama is suitably calibrated to the crisis. Along the Poland-Belarus border, a small band of migrants from Syria and Afghanistan are sent back and forth across a wooded borderland — sometimes they’re even literally tossed — in a grim game of “not in my backyard.” It’s not an easy movie to watch, nor should it be. To keep up with the times, more uncomfortable movies like this may be needed. Streaming on Kino Film Collection, available for digital rental.
6. “The Fall Guy”
6. “The fall guy”
We also need more big, fun movies with Ryan Gosling. David Leitch’s affectionate ode to stunt performers manages to celebrate behind-the-scenes crew members while simultaneously being completely carried by two of our most winning movie stars in Gosling and Emily Blunt. The societal value of watching Gosling cry to Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” should not be underestimated. Streaming on Peacock, available for digital rental.
7. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”
7. “The seed of the sacred fig”
The way the Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, who was forced into exile while editing this, condenses real-life social upheaval into a family drama makes this a uniquely disquieting film. Like Kurosawa’s “Stray Dog,” Rasoulof’s movie centers around a lost handgun. The subsequent search reveals just how deeply the Iranian government’s policies have seeped into the most intimate relationships. In theaters.
8. “Ghostlight” and “Sing Sing”
8. “Sing sing”
We had not one but two movies this year that captured the therapeutic properties of theater. Each, almost unbelievably, deftly eludes tipping into cliche thanks to abiding compassion and authenticity in the performances. Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan’s “Ghostlight” is about a grieving father, a construction worker (an exceptional Keith Kupferer), who reluctantly joins a local production of “Romeo and Juliet.” “Sing Sing” dramatizes a real rehabilitation prison program. Its screening at Sing Sing Correctional, where many of its performers were once incarcerated, was easily the most moving moviegoing experience of the year for me. “Ghostlight” is available for digital rental. “Sing Sing” returns to theaters Jan. 17.
10. “A Real Pain”
Jesse Eisenberg grapples with modern and historical trauma in the disarmingly entertaining road trip film “A Real Pain,” which he wrote, directed and stars in alongside Kieran Culkin as cousins on a Holocaust tour in Poland. In theaters. MDT/AP
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