Naysayers be damned. The mainstream film industry may be on its last legs but the cinematic art form is alive and well. I enjoyed so many films this year I actually have two top-ten lists that are largely interchangeable. If you want to hear my other ten, feel free to check out the end of year review on my podcast The Cinematologists. Following on from last year’s approach, here are my ten for DN. All ten were released in UK cinemas (or debuted on streaming) in 2024 and are listed here alphabetically.
Honourable mentions: The Delinquents, Sky Peals, The Holdovers, The Settlers, Sometimes I Think About Dying
10. ADAM SANDLER: LOVE YOU | Josh Safdie
The last two Sandler specials for Netflix have been wonderful. I admire his commitment to being silly, and sentimental. In a world as messy as this, there needs to be places for silliness, and there are few who have ever done silly as well as Sandler. Genuinely funny, and the final tribute to comedy song is both hilarious and deeply moving.
9. DAHOMEY | Alice Diop
Do we have culture if we can’t talk about culture in our own language? Diop is a filmmaker who can bring profound verisimilitude to narrative work, and seismic emotion to stories based on historical events and figures. As treasures are ‘returned’ to Benin by France, questions of colonialism and patronising benevolence abound, all delivered with a gracious cinematic flow that sometimes recalls Wiseman, Benning and Akerman.
8. HIS THREE DAUGHTERS | Azalea Jacobs
Familial death brings sibling reckoning and gives three stunning actresses room to dig in. All three accept the invitation with glee. Azalea Jacobs’ film revels in the theatrical space of letting actors get into crevices of emotion through beautiful dialogue over extended sequences. Some of it funny, some of it devastating, some cutting into the viewer’s own muscle memory of closeness and conflict.
Most Popular
7. HIT MAN | Richard Linklater
Glen Powell = Alec Guinness x Steve McQueen and I’m so here for it. It’s delightful to have a movie star like Glen Powell around, taking on the kind of roles he delivers here – humorous, sexy, charming, pensive – in work for Linklater, but also enlivening blockbusters and franchise fare. This film is a hoot, with wonderful central chemistry that recalls Out of Sight, even if the intention here is just to be top notch entertainment. There’s nowt wrong wi’ that.
6. HOARD | Luna Carmoon
Big year for female British directors going where male and international peers didn’t. Rose Glass did with Love Lies Bleeding, and so does Luna Carmoon here. Bold and exciting debut. Psychosexual discomfort, A-grade performances and a distinctive blend of social and magic realisms, coupled with the ability to make viewers physically recoil without losing empathy. Some of the residue recalls the episode of The Young Ones where they all get flu. In a good way.
5. JANET PLANET | Annie Baker
One of the best playwrights of the new century makes a gorgeous celluloid feature that heralds her as maybe one of this century’s best filmmakers also. Baker has an uncanny ability to shift the needle on representations of women and girls, middle and working class, enough to place her work both in lineage but also out on its own. Gorgeously shot by Maria von Hausswolff who shot Godland a couple of years ago.
4. ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS | Wei Shujun
Detectives working inside a cinema, investigating a murder, in a detective story wrapped inside cinema history. China Noir par excellence. There’s a nihilism and desperation here that feels timeless in terms of its understanding of Noir, but also captures something of the contemporary moment even for a film that is set in the 1990s. The film flows between classic cinema stylings and post-modern staging that brings its artifice and love of movies to the surface. More of Wei’s movies getting a UK release would be nice.
3. PERFECT DAYS | Wim Wenders
Wenders does Ozu (again?) but with added Faulkner, and Patti Smith cassettes. An ode to finding contentment and small joys in the every day and in work, but also slowing down and concentrating on one thing at a time – a book, an album, a person – that feels radical in such an overloaded age. The best thing Wenders has done narratively in a long time. A great later work.
2. THAT THEY MAY FACE THE RISING SUN | Pat Collins
The Poetry of Community. Pat Collins makes a shift into a more fully fictional space from his incredible past work that blends doc and fiction so beautifully. A companion piece to Perfect Days in ways. Moving away from the city, from the crowd, to grow life (a)new. The lure of the other, the politics of people anywhere. So much richness in this adaptation. Death and art in nature, relationships and created artworks. Shamefully overlooked filmmaker Collins. Shameful.
1. WILL & HARPER | Josh Greenbaum
A hilarious, moving and scary story of friendship that opens up some of the most challenging but vitally necessary questions of our day. There are scenes in terms of the interactions that Will Ferrell and Harper Steele have on their cross-US road trip to explore the latter coming out and living as Trans, that surprise in terms of the tolerance and acceptance possible in some places in the US. There are some that don’t surprise but are still bracing in their cruelty and violence. It’s hard to not love Ferrell more than I did anyway, given how open and human he is in trying to understand his friend and by extension the Trans community at large. An appropriate use of celebrity to throw further light on such an important story.
You can check out the rest of Team DN’s Top Ten picks here.
