Big Statements, Never Preachy

The Brutalist: Brady Corbet’s 200-minute epic tells the story of a Holocaust survivor and architect (Adrien Brody), and his complex relationship with America, through his project building a community center for an industrialist (Guy Pearce). It’s a Big Movie with a Big Statement that succeeds more than most who try such things, and it features the best musical score in years, by Daniel Blumberg.

Anora: Sean Baker has made another kinetic film, once again told through the eyes of a sex worker (this time, Mikey Madison’s Brooklyn stripper), who marries the idiot son of a Russian oligarch. The movie’s thrilling centerpiece is a mad rush through Brighton Beach, with the oligarch’s henchmen (Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, and Vache Tovmasyan).

Hit Man: This comedy/drama from Richard Linklater—for the second time, adapting a true crime magazine story by Skip Hollandsworth—stars Glen Powell in another magnetic turn as a professor who moonlights as an undercover cop who impersonates a hitman. This leads into a romance (with Adria Arjona), and also the best movie scene of the year.

Nickel Boys: The most inventively-told movie of the year is from RaMell Ross, adapting Colson Whitehead’s novel and telling the story of an abusive school for boys in Florida in the 1960s. The camera is behind the characters’ heads, as the story moves back and forth in time and leads up to a gut-punch of an ending.

Drive-Away Dolls: The Coen brothers remain split, but Ethan Coen this year made a movie that feels like a vintage Coen comedy, albeit one with a queer sensibility. Maggie Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan play gay best friends, driving a car from Philly to Florida, containing cargo that a group of criminals want. It’s funny, sexy, and leads to surprising places.

I Saw the TV Glow :Jane Schoenbrun's sophomore effort is at once a loving homage to 1990s television, a festival of teen nostalgia, and an allegory about the transgender experience. It’s never preachy, but always exhilarating.

A Complete Unknown: James Mangold’s look back at four years in the life of Bob Dylan in the 1960s is Boomer History, but it’s mounted in the best way possible, with a faithfully recreated Greenwich Village and Newport, dynamite performances from Timothee Chalamet and Monica Barbaro, and less fealty to music biopic convention than you’d think.

September 5: A telling of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, told through the eyes of the ABC Sports personnel who were there to cover the Games but ended up on top of a very different, much more horrible story. It’s never less than tense, even though most people watching will know exactly how it turned out.

Memoir of a Snail: The year’s best animated film is this Australian effort from director Adam Elliott, about the tragic but ultimately triumphant girl named Grace, who’s not a snail but is obsessed with them. Grace is voiced by Sarah Snook, showing that 2024 was a huge year at the movies for all three of the main Roy siblings.

The Wild Robot: Another great animated effort is this Dreamworks/Universal film from director Chris Sanders. Arriving 25 years after The Iron Giant, it’s another triumphant film about a heroic robot.

Best documentaries: Sugarcane, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, A Storm Foretold, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, Eno, Luther: Never Too Much, The Greatest Night in Pop, Billy & Molly, Jim Henson: Idea Man, Will & Harper.

The 10 worst: Joker: Folie a Deux, Madame Web, Mandela Effect Phenomenon, Am I Racist?, Aggro Drift, God Bless Bitcoin, Water’s Secrets and Betrayals, America’s Burning, Unfrosted and Boy Kills World.