The Top 10 Films of 2024
You exist in the Conclave of all in which you live and what held space before you
2024 in Review
You’re laughing. J.D. Vance killed the Pope, and you’re laughing. Yes, it took me a few extra months to finish watching the oeuvre of 2024 because I have been traveling and also working for a living1, but Rome wasn’t filled with partisan Cardinals in a day. Oh, what a year it was—a wax statue of President Lincoln achieved our collective dream of melting during a D.C. heatwave, BRAT summer possessed every Park Slope twink and Haight-Ashbury “California Sober” girlie to purchase poppers, and the most annoying man you know has finally stopped saying “no homo” because now he has evolved to say “no Diddy.” I’m new to sports, how poorly do the Summer Olympics need to go for an entire sport to be banned and a participant’s family to be criminally investigated?
One thing I learned in a year of globally poor decisions is that we evidently care a lot about who most resembles Timothée Chalamet, or what Chappell Roan thinks about geopolitics, or if Moo Deng is mindful and demure, or how the Rizzler is now only four degrees of separation from Chairman Mao, or how you think you just fell out of a coconut tree, or how hot Luigi Mangione is. But one thing we don’t seem to care about is the truth. Can you even guess which of these headlines is real?
Brat Summer Declared a Fiscal Quarter as Charli XCX Becomes Chair of the Federal Reserve (in Slaybucks)
Taylor Swift Wins Super Bowl MVP After Throwing Final Touchdown to Ice Spice in Historic Halftime Extension, meanwhile Kendrick Lamar's Juneteenth Diss Track Added to National Archives and Drake Added to No-Fly List
Elon Musk Rebrands X Again—Now Called 'Yeet'—After Hiring North West as Secretary of the Interior and Unveiling Limited-Edition Treasury-Backed Grimes NFT Coin to Fund TikTok Diplomacy Initiative
In the true spirit of 2024, all of these were actually written by ChatGPT. One medium, luckily, kept holding space for truth amidst the noise—arthouse cinema. In a year of box office flops and uninspired adaption slops, Zendaya making twinks fight and Zendaya making twinks kiss, Glen Powell being played everywhere and Katy Perry being played nowhere, I still saw some works of genius that posed real questions: how can we handle a changing world? How can we adapt to a superficial, transactional social order? Is Jon Stewart returning to host The Daily Show a recession indicator?2 World cinema asked fearless questions, and their answers arrived tariff-free.
Honorable Mention
14. A Traveler’s Needs
Country: South Korea 🇰🇷 (original title: 여행자의 필요)
Director: Hong Sang-soo • Shaun’s Score: 3.7/5★
Hong Sang-soo will always be the quiet comfort food of the cinema world. This is his third collab with Isabelle Huppert, following a mysterious French woman through Seoul—glad to see she, too, has had her Emily in Paris moment.
13. Santosh
Country: India 🇮🇳
Director: Sandhya Suri • Shaun’s Score: 3.7/5★
Self-preservation and corruption are universally topical. Perhaps the best narrative feature directing debut of the year.
12. Close Your Eyes
Countries: Spain 🇪🇸 & Argentina 🇦🇷 (original title: Cerrar Los Ojos)
Director: Víctor Erice • Shaun’s Score: 3.8/5★
It’s been over fifty years since Erice’s genre-defining The Secret of the Beehive (1973), and his latest release is a meditative lesson in permanence and loss. He once quoted Jean Renoir that films are “made to create a bridge.” In Close Your Eyes, we see that bridge—what art does for people, and how our memories keep that art alive.
11. Việt and Nam
Country: Vietnam 🇻🇳 (original title: Trong lòng đất)
Director: Trương Minh Quý • Shaun’s Score: 3.8/5★
Southeast Asian cinema is having a moment. For Vietnam, remnants of war and colonialism tug at the seams of self-determination, shaping and reshaping what (and where) yearning is allowed. The two titular characters embody this ebb and flow, finding the few precious spots of darkness where they are free to explore their own desires. Some fun, kinky symbolism that makes you miss the simple days where horny boys just drank bath water, and a coal mine scene that hits “rock bottom.”3
The Official Top 10
10. Conclave
Country: United Kingdom 🇬🇧
Director: Edward Berger • Shaun’s Score: 3.9/5★
The politicking and pageantry of the Holy See more closely resembles a Chinese period drama like 后宫甄嬛传 or an episode of Real Housewives of Vatican City than a religious ceremonial, but the drama is not undercooked. Also, I can never find fault in Stanley Tucci. Two people it made me respect more, somehow: RuPaul and Nancy Pelosi.
9. The Room Next Door
Country: Spain 🇪🇸 (original title: La habitación de al lado)
Director: Pedro Almodóvar • Shaun’s Score: 3.9/5★
You need to get Almodóvar to get this film, because the script does sound like it was passed through Google Translate a few times (and that’s just sort of his thing). It reminds me of a much less interesting movie from a few years ago called Tout s'est bien passé that premiered at Cannes under the category of “this movie isn’t actually worthy of selection, but it’s French so the director is probably friends with the committee.” Almodóvar brings an interesting twist to that idea, set in some fantasy version of America where Airbnbs still have DVD players.
8 (tie). On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Country: Zambia 🇿🇲
Director: Rungano Nyoni • Shaun’s Score: 4.0/5★
I’m no stranger to the story of a yuppie returning to their rural hometown and reconciling the internal contradictions of tradition and modernity, of the world as it was explained to you and the world as you want it to be. In learning to survive inside rigid systems, it will be your forced flexibility that leaves you unrecognizably contorted.
8 (tie). A Different Man
Country: United States 🇺🇸
Director: Aaron Schimberg • Shaun’s Score: 4.0/5★
For A Different Man, Sebastian Stan won the Silver Bear for Best Lead Performance, and the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy), and he deserved to win an Oscar as well. This film was a disarming force—a parable of choices that pulls the rug out from under you just when you think you get what it’s saying. Further evidence that Marvel hides real talent in their rank and file.
7. The Brutalist
Countries: United States 🇺🇸 + Hungary 🇭🇺
Director: Brady Corbet • Shaun’s Score: 4.1/5★
The “inversion” of the American Dream is not just a visual metaphor for the poster—it’s a reality we’re watching unfold in real life. I’ve already done a longer write-up on this, so unlike Adrien Brody, I’ll stop talking at an appropriate time.
6. The Beast
Country: France 🇫🇷 (original title: La Bête)
Director: Bertrand Bonello • Shaun’s Score: 4.2/5★
Léa Seydoux is transfixing. The fear of not acting at the right time, which forces you to not act at all—the fear that you’re all alone, which forces you to stay that way. I really like seeing a director that isn’t Christopher Nolan play with time.
5. Anora
Country: United States 🇺🇸
Director: Sean Baker • Shaun’s Score: 4.3/5★
Sean Baker has a talent for natural, engaging storytelling that never exhausts nor confuses his audience. You don’t need to worry about the story jumping the shark, but as always, you do need to worry about twinks being evil.
Sin & Cinephilia’s Top 4
4. All We Imagine as Light
Country: India 🇮🇳 (orignal title: പ്രഭയായ് നിനച്ചതെല്ലം)
Director: Payal Kapadia • Shaun’s Score: 4.4/5★
As the first Indian feature to compete In Competition at Cannes since 1994, All We Imagine as Light had high expectations. Luckily, Kapadia created a tender view of found family and loneliness that stays with you after you exit the theater—we watch three women, each at a different stage of life, chafe against their expectations until we feel like we know them personally. Yes, I’ve watched too much Kore-eda for my own good, but I’ll never get tired of humanists on the big screen.
*** Sin & Cinephilia’s
Bronze Ram Award 🥉 ***
3. Nickel Boys
Country: United States 🇺🇸
Director: RaMell Ross • Shaun’s Score: 4.5/5★
Perspective is a tool that Ross does not use lightly. Each frame, even if seemingly innocuous, tells a story—an empty car seat, a cane pressed to a chest, an industrial fan. The result after 140 minutes of perspective is a devastation so deep and resounding that the only way you can process it is to rewind and start the film again. In a kinder world, this would have gotten more attention at the Academy Awards... maybe we’ll see a shift in quality now that voters are actually required to watch the movies.
*** Sin & Cinephilia’s
Silver Ram Award 🥈 ***
2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Country: Iran 🇮🇷 (original title: دانهی انجیر معابد)
Director: Mohammad Rasoulof • Shaun’s Score: 4.7/5★
There’s a certain tier of badass that is reserved for directors who make movies banned in their home countries. Rasoulof, after shooting one of the most incredible films of the decade, was sentenced to eight years in prison and flogging in Iran for his previous films and activism. He dumped all of his electronic devices and fled through the mountains on foot, completing a harrowing twenty-eight day journey before arriving in Germany, then popping into France just in time for The Seed of the Sacred Fig’s festival debut. The fact that Greta Gerwig still chose to give both the Jury Prize and the Best Actress prize to Emilia Pérez after this man literally fled political persecution is, frankly, insane—to quote Barbie, “either you're brainwashed or you're weird.”
*** Sin & Cinephilia’s
Golden Ram Award 🥇 ***
1. Caught by the Tides
Country: China 🇨🇳 (original title: 风流一代)
Director: Jia Zhangke • Shaun’s Score: 4.9/5★
At the North American premiere in Toronto, I listened to Jia Zhangke share the fear that haunted him most in releasing this movie, starring his wife and longtime muse, Zhao Tao. Caught by the Tides was shot across decades, stitching together extra footage from a handful of earlier projects like Still Life (2006) up through the COVID years—it’s one of the few movies to actually confront the trauma of the Three Gorges Dam without flinching. Millions were displaced, hundreds went missing or died in the flooding, and cities with thousands of years of history were erased in a relative blink of an eye. And yet, what unsettled director Jia the most about this premiere was something more personal: the prospect of showing his wife aging twenty years on screen. He reportedly waited outside the first pre-screening, a nervous cigarette in hand, unable to bear watching her watch herself.
Caught by the Tides is a spellbinding meditation on how much China has changed in twenty years, barreling through breakneck industrialization and technological advancements, pandemics and political shifts. We pass from the muddy banks of the Yangtze to a post-pandemic world of Douyin influencers and AI assistants, tracing the lives of those who’ve drifted apart or been left behind by the tides of progress. Caught by the Tides is the story not just of China, but of the world as a whole in the twenty-first century: change comes rapidly, and sometimes we’re left searching for truth and meaning in the flood waters. But beyond its chronicle of transformation, the film becomes something more fragile and human: a documentary of time, of memory, and of his love for his wife. Zhao Tao, unwaveringly luminous across the years, grounds the film’s shifting terrain, reminding us that endurance is the most fundamental form of resistance. When she emerged from that pre-screening with a smile, she only needed one phrase to comfort her anxious husband: “Yes. That is me.”
Some of you should give this a try.
Also, Leslie Odom Jr. is returning to Hamilton?? Are there like, 0 jobs left anywhere?
I know, I’m sorry for that joke.