The 50 best films of 2024 (2025)

What could the cinema do for us, in a year as violent and divided as 2024? It’s a lot to ask of art to save the planet, but it can at least, we hope, inform and educate, broadening our collective horizons – a salve in an age of misinformation, culture wars and starkly polarised political debates. The international diversity of this year’s winners and their subject matter, chosen by a global pool of critics, gives a heartening sense of broadened horizons. Cinema has always been the fastest way totravel.

Our worthy winner is a film about love, but one that takes a clear stance against Islamophobia and other religious, caste and class prejudices that constrict real people’s lives. For its maker, love can be “both a form of resistance against society, but also [a step] towards having choice for women”. Such a feminist message sits comfortably at the top of this year’s poll. There are more female than male directors in the top ten, a feat that has only happened once before, in the pandemic year of 2020, when there were seven women listed – this year findssix.

— PamelaHutchinson

The best films of2024

=41. Afternoons ofSolitude

Albert Serra, France, Portugal,Spain

Winner of the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Albert Serra’s impressionistic and intimate bullfighting documentary shows the beauty and the barbarism of the controversial tradition, filming Peruvian wunderkind torero Andrés Roca Rey across 14bullfights.

Where to see it: Awaiting UKdistribution

=41. All of UsStrangers

Andrew Haigh, UK, US

Andrew Haigh’s time-slipping film is a deeply affecting, supernatural exploration of the profound consequences of grief andhomophobia.

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

=41.April

Dea Kulumbegashvili, France, Italy,Georgia

Dea Kulumbegashvili follows up her stunning debut, Beginning (2020), with an unflinching, excoriating story of a Georgian obstetrician whose career is threatened by her reputation as anabortionist.

Where to see it: UK release date yet to beannounced

=41. BlackDog

Guan Hu,China

An ex-convict tasked with cleaning up a desert town in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics forms an unlikely bond with a dog in this surprising crime drama that mixes noir moodiness with slapstickabsurdity.

Where to see it: On DVD and Blu-ray from 27 January2025

=41.Conclave

Edward Berger, UK, US

Ralph Fiennes leads a bitter, gossipy group of cardinals through an attempt to elect a new pope in Edward Berger’s adaptation of Robert Harris’s page-turner: a brisk and engrossing ecclesiasticalhoot.

Where to see it: In UK cinemasnow

=41. Dune: PartTwo

Denis Villeneuve, US, Canada, UAE, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand, Jordan,Gambia

Denis Villeneuve’s latest instalment from Frank Herbert’s space opera is a war movie-cum-swashbuckling adventure loaded with giant worms and vivid villains, and unobtrusive parallels with the current state of global powerpolitics.

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

=41. GreenBorder

Agnieszka Holland, Poland, France, Czech Republic, Belgium, US, Germany,Turkey

Agnieszka Holland’s compassionate film about the dehumanising treatment of refugees on the Belarus-Poland border interrogates the European response to the migrant crisis in all its complexity andinjustice.

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

=41. TheHoldovers

Alexander Payne, US

Consciously evoking the cinema of mid-budget early 70s Hollywood, Alexander Payne’s high-school heartwarmer, starring a never-better Paul Giamatti, is every bit the equal of the films that inspired itsaesthetic.

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

=41. I’m StillHere

Walter Salles, Brazil,France

A fictional restaging of the real-life disappearance of engineer Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) in 1970 at the hands of the Brazilian dictatorship, with his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) movingly devoting her life to discovering the truth of what happened tohim.

Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 21 February2025

=41. Juror#2

Clint Eastwood, US

A juror on a murder trial comes to suspect himself as the killer in Clint Eastwood’s stern parable of morality and conscience and terse interrogation of the American justicesystem.

Where to see it: In UK cinemasnow

=35. About DryGrasses

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, France, Germany, Sweden,Qatar

The focus is firmly on telling over showing in Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s cerebral, formally audacious film about a disengaged art teacher in a quiet Anatolian village who is accused of inappropriatebehaviour.

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

=35. By theStream

Hong Sangsoo, SouthKorea

The prolific Korean auteur’s minimalist story centred around four untrained actors working on a skit may not be his most visually inventive, but the performances find notes of grace and profoundsincerity.

Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 31 January2025

=35.Misericordia

Alain Guiraudie, France, Spain,Portugal

French director Alain Guiraudie is one of the most unique and transgressive voices in cinema, and this fabulously compelling rural melodrama, steeped in dark desires, again reveals his penchant for genre-hopping and narrativeunpredictability.

Where to see it: UK release date yet to beannounced

=35. Sanatorium Under the Sign of theHourglass

Quay Brothers, UK, Poland,Germany

The Brothers Quay return to Bruno Schulz’s limbo world with this dream-like, part stop-motion-animated train journey to a terminally derelict sanatorium somewhere in a hazy, haunted easternEurope.

Where to see it: Awaiting UKdistribution

=35. The Seed of the SacredFig

Mahommad Rasoulof, Iran, Germany,France

A tense family unit serves as a microcosm of life under Iran’s authoritarian regime in this genre-inflected drama from exiled director MohammadRasoulof.

Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 7 February2025

=35. The Taste ofThings

Tran Anh Hung, France,Belgium

Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche sauté up a storm in this delightfully sweet romance between a man and his cook, which features many a mouthwateringscene.

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

=31. TheBeast

Bertrand Bonello, France,Canada

A focus on omnipresent AI makes this era-hopping sci-fi, starring Léa Seydoux, Bonello’s most topical film todate.

Where to see it: On Mubinow

=31. CivilWar

Alex Garland, US, UK,Finland

Four photojournalists and writers go to extreme lengths to cover the violent atrocities of a North American civil war in Alex Garland’s thrilling examination of Hollywoodviolence.

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

=31. Furiosa: A Mad MaxSaga

George Miller, Australia, US

George Miller remains a master craftsman of bloody petrol-punk visuals in this mythology-stuffed backstory to Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), with Anya Taylor-Joy portraying Furiosa’s gruesome and gruelling coming ofage.

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

=31. The Room NextDoor

Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, US

Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature offers a philosophical view of euthanasia with its gentle story of two old friends, played by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, navigating the realities ofdeath.

Where to see it: In UK cinemasnow

=25.Crossing

Levan Akin, Sweden, Denmark, France, Turkey,Georgia

A Georgian woman goes in search of her estranged trans niece in this elegant, politically resonant feature by SwedishGeorgian director LevanAkin.

We said: “Through Tekla’s backstory, which emerges gradually, we understand the precarity of trans lives and the daily risk of violence in Georgia’s very patriarchal society, where her family drove her out of home… In this difficult terrain, Akin creates a beautifully poetic sense of place. It’s a testament to his empathetic respect for difference (and his family’s connection to Turkey) that none of this feels voyeuristic or exploitatively touristic.” (Carmen Gray, S&SJuly)

Where to see it: On Mubinow

=25.Kneecap

Rich Peppiat, Ireland, UK

Belfast rap group Kneecap rail against British imperialism and fight for the Irish language in this outlandish, exhilarating film based on the band’s originstory.

We said: “From having their first single banned from Irish radio for ‘drug references and cursing’ to riling unionist politicians with their ‘Brits out’ slogan, Kneecap are unapologetically brash and republican. So is the film, which provokes the audiences with gleeful chants of ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’ (‘Our day will come’) – the only phrase used more often may be ‘Fenian cunts’, howled back at the trio by police who are shown as variously feckless and sadistic.” (Thomas Flew, S&SSeptember)

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

=25. On Becoming a GuineaFowl

Rungano Nyoni, Zambia, UK,Ireland

Nyoni’s follow-up to I Am Not a Witch (2017) interrogates Zambian generational divides through a darkly funny story of a woman, a family and a community performing grief rituals for a man who no one willmiss.

We said: “The film’s images are made even more dreamlike by the near-perpetual night, each moment lit by the sapphire blue of the moon, where the light itself seems to dance along each surface like billowing silk. Such moments are intercut by the glaring primary colours of an old children’s television programme called Farm Club to which Shula’s memory keeps returning – in particular an episode about guinea fowl.” (Leila Latif, S&S Winter2024-25)

Read the full review:

Where to see it: In UK cinemasnow

=25. TheShrouds

David Cronenberg, Canada,France

David Cronenberg’s macabre modern love story stars Vincent Cassel as a widowed cemetery owner who invents grave cams for the grieving as a way to make sense of hisloss.

We said: “The genre machinations of The Shrouds can feel like a grappling with a deep loss in this artist’s chosen language. Cronenberg has long used genre’s freedoms to liberate our empathic imagination to feel something forbidden or unfamiliar, or something so familiar that he gives us a combined estrangement and gross bear-hug to feel it anew – grief as a ghost story made flesh, and prolonged thanks to ShroudCam.” (Nicolas Rapold, S&Sonline)

Where to see it: Awaiting UKdistribution

=25. Soundtrack to a Coupd’Etat

Johan Grimonprez, Belgium, France,Netherlands

Johan Grimonprez’s vibrant documentary sets the events surrounding the assassination of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s independence leader Patrice Lumumba against a soundtrack of 1960sjazz.

We said: “Grimonprez literally soundtracks the slow unfolding of this malfeasance with jazz of the period fired up with a new sense of political activism and Afrocentrism. This music presents a kind of commentary on Lumumba’s struggle and defeat but, in Grimonprez’s telling, has a tragic dimension of its own: musicians such as Armstrong and Gillespie were convinced to tour Africa and Asia as cultural outreach activities that later turned out to be CIA-backed PR exercises.” (Sam Davies, S&SNovember)

Where to see it: In UK cinemasnow

=25. UniversalLanguage

Matthew Rankin,Canada

Matthew Rankin follows in the surrealist footsteps of his debut The Twentieth Century (2019) with a brilliantly bizarre comedy that imagines a Canada where the two official languages are Farsi andFrench.

We said: “The bizarreries which line the film are so plainly personal, a trait renewed by a quick swapping of actors’ roles in the last act to affirm the title’s universality and our comforting sameness. Major touchstones include the works of Winnipeg auteur Guy Maddin and the deadpan scenarios of Roy Andersson, but the main sites of influence on Rankin’s latest are the childhood parables of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.” (Saffron Maeve, S&Sonline)

Where to see it: Awaiting UKdistribution

=21. Close YourEyes

Victor Erice, Spain,Argentina

Victor Erice’s first feature in 30 years deals with the disappearance of a fictional actor and explores loss, grief and the exquisite power ofcinema.

We said: “The carefully composed opening sequence of Close Your Eyes feels like Erice has never been away. Daylight gradually fills a shadowy interior, just as in the opening of El sur (1983). Characters speak in hushed tones about splintered families and father-daughter recriminations reminiscent of The Spirit of the Beehive, even if they allude to the country’s Franco dictatorship in a more direct way than that film’s dreamlike allegory.” (Leigh Singer, S&SMay)

Where to see it: On BFI Player and otherplatforms

=21. A DifferentMan

Aaron Schimberg, US

Sebastian Stan stars as an actor whose face is transformed by an experimental treatment for his genetic condition in Aaron Schimberg’s mischievously meta doppelgängertale.

We said: “Even with the deliberate air of staginess and tricksiness that permeates the self-consciously meta A Different Man, there is also a real mischief in the filmmaking. Schimberg’s deliciously twisted play on duality and morality and polarity never answers whether it’s better to be despised for what you are than admired for what you’re not. But it does impishly insist we count our blessings if we’ve never had to find out.” (Jessica Kiang, S&SOctober)

Where to see it: In UK cinemasnow

=21. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of theWorld

Radu Jude, Romania, Luxembourg, France, Croatia, Switzerland, UK

Radu Jude’s rude, relentless and original provocation skewers the managerial classes as it speeds through late-capitalistBucharest.

We said: “Jude skewers managerial classes and the falseness of choice for workers when power and money imbalances are severe. But far from declaring political points, he also strives to capture the textures and rhythms of modern existence – and in its discontinuity and relentlessness – with a sense of adventure and specificity notable among his contemporaries. It’s the sort of film that can sound like satire at times but turns out to be a mirror to twisted realities (as with the anecdote of a production assistant harangued to work without sleep who eventually died). Ilinca Manolache has an enviable unself-consciousness in the role, disappearing into Angela’s multitasking momentum… Jude’s film rewards rewatching and… bristles with the detail and the hum of a life in motion.” (Nicolas Rapold, S&SApril)

Where to see it: On BFI Player and otherplatforms

=21. Henry Fonda forPresident

Alexander Horwarth, Austria,Germany

A three-hour essay film exploring the history and politics of the United States through the life and work of one of its most enduring icons, the actor HenryFonda.

We say: “The director of this transfixing gem of an essay film is Alexander Horwath, distinguished curator of and writer on cinema based in Vienna, where he ran the local film festival before heading up the Filmmuseum for many years. Horwath’s cinephilic erudition and analytical rigour are marshalled to superb effect in this portrait of Henry Fonda, whose personal history and choice of film roles – particularly those made with John Ford – mark him out as a kind of quintessential everyman figure; a liberal-minded avatar of American democratic ideals. The film is therefore as much a portrait of America as of Fonda, with Horwath forging intricate connections to reveal how the actor’s work and life intersect with and illuminate key moments in US history. It’s sheer delight from start to finish, and looks wonderful courtesy of cinematographer Michael Palm. Watching the film in the light of Trump’s re-election inevitably gives it an added piquancy and poignancy.” (KieronCorless)

Where to see it: Awaiting UKdistribution

=17. TheBrutalist

Brady Corbet, US, UK,Hungary

Adrien Brody stars as a Bauhaus architect and Holocaust survivor who flees Europe for Pennsylvania in this beautifully constructed post-war epic, set over threedecades.

We said: “At a length of just over three and a half hours including overture and intermission – the film might seem like a big ask, but Corbet’s story never sprawls or meanders. Bold American filmmaking like this will invite comparisons with Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012), as well as perhaps King Vidor’s great silent film The Crowd (1928), but it is also entirely Corbet’s own distinctive voice and vision. Toth is played with a kind of broken gusto by Adrien Brody, offering by far his best work in years. In The Brutalist, the artist suffers, but not for art: he suffers simply what history inflicts. Corbet’s film is a grandiose edifice, but he is as interested in the crumbling foundations as the soaring heights.” (John Bleasdale, S&Sonline)

Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 24 January2025

=17. EmiliaPérez

Jacques Audiard, France,Belgium

Jacques Audiard’s story of a Mexican cartel leader who fakes their own death to conceal a gender transition is anything but subtle, but it’s neverboring.

We said: “Emilia Pérez shouldn’t work. For one, there are too many plates spinning: a mix of genres ranging from crime caper to queer musical, trans telenovela and lesbian romance to state-of-the-nation exposé; an improbable redemption arc, and tonal shifts that fly by quick enough to give you whiplash. Surely its septuagenarian French director is going to slip up on the shifting sands of political correctness? Perhaps the biggest surprise in Emilia Pérez is not the director’s giddy experimentation with genre and form (Audiard has never been shy in that department and crime is a prevalent theme in his work), but that it casts such a heartfelt and even sympathetic look at gender transition. Neither of those adjectives should be confused with subtle. Emilia Pérez is many things, but it most definitely is not boring.” (Sophia Satchell-Baeza, S&SNovember)

Where to see it: In UK cinemas and onNetflix

=17. GrandTour

Miguel Gomes, Portugal, Italy,France

Miguel Gomes elegantly bridges 100 years of film history with an experimental, time-bending colonial-era story of a British civil servant trying to outrun his persistentfiancée.

We said: “Grand Tour is another seductive ode to cinema by this most cinephilic of filmmakers. In a concept reminiscent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), Gomes and his co-writers conceived the script while zig-zagging across south-east and east Asia, collecting 16mm footage along the way. All the scripted scenes featuring actors were shot on studio sets back in Europe, assuming a look that recalls classical cinema. By alternating between the staged and documentary images, Grand Tour elegantly bridges a hundred years of (film) history, though without any pretence to seamlessness. Unlike in Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018), the collapsing of past and present does not convey a political message – the effect is purely poetic. The story and its emotions might be anchored in reality, but they follow a logic that is exclusive to cinema.” (Giovanni Marchini Camia, S&Sonline)

Where to see it: UK release date yet to beannounced

=17.Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola, US

Four decades in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s audacious New Roman project is only conventionally digestible as an old-fashioned lovestory.

We said: “Part of what’s fascinating and frustrating about Coppola’s most ambitious and audacious film, Megalopolis, developed over more than four decades, is the degree to which it revels in its own revisions – superimposing what look like later drafts over earlier ones, rather than using them as replacements. Far from emerging sadder but wiser, Megalopolis lands in our laps both happier and dumber for its lack of inhibitions. The conceit of imagining New York in terms of the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC (an attempted coup d’é tat against the consuls who ruled Rome) entails not only a collapse of today, tomorrow and yesterday but alternative versions of all three, and therefore a city reinvented whenever there’s a new scene to unravel. But the point of Megalopolis may be that we eventually teach ourselves how to make sense of it.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, S&SNovember)

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

16. PerfectDays

Wim Wenders, Japan,Germany

Wim Wenders concentrates on the quiet routine moments in the life of a Tokyo toilet cleaner in a delicate, meditative film that adapts the director’s documentary approach to a fictionalsubject.

We said: “What a delightful surprise that Perfect Days is Wenders’s best and most winning fiction film since Wings of Desire (1987), both an example of late style evolving out of a return to first principles and, more simply, of Wenders adapting the documentary approach, which has rarely failed him, to a fictional subject. A man of few words, Hirayama is more an observer of the film’s mini dramas than a participant. Central to his attitude to life is komorebi, the Japanese word for the shimmering of light and shadow created by leaves swaying in the wind, something that exists once, only at that moment. It’s important, too, that in his pleasures, Hirayama sticks to analogue culture. The argument seems to be that the imperfections of audio cassettes and emulsion film enhance komorebi.” (Nick James, S&SMarch)

Where to see it: On Mubi and otherplatforms

=14. JanetPlanet

Annie Baker, US, UK

Playwright Annie Baker’s quietly majestic film debut follows 11-year-old Lacy as she competes with new arrivals for her mother’s attention over one long, languid summer in 1991 westernMassachusetts.

We said: “Baker is known for being unafraid of silences and sparse plots, and her first film is daringly elliptical, the passage of time denoted through droll intertitles and muffled adult conversations beneath Lacy’s bedroom window. Seeing the warm, wide 16mm shots of the redheaded Lacy – dwarfed by verdant woodland and existential questions – it’s hard not to think of Céline Sciamma’s magic realist childhood fable Petite maman (2021), but Janet Planet turns out to be icier terrain. The film has enough empathy to go round – for a mother overwhelmed by a child’s bottomless need, and a child’s agony over the changing rules of their bond. Like Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance nue (1968), which Baker cites as an influence, it hangs on the ability of its child actor to communicate a complex interior life, and Ziegler delivers, unnervingly so.” (Katie McCabe, S&SSeptember)

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

=14. The Zone ofInterest

Jonathan Glazer, UK, Poland, US

Glazer’s film puts the focus on SS Officer Rudolf Höss and his family, letting the banality of their lives play out as the horrors of Auschwitz unfold in thebackground.

We said: “Point of view is Glazer’s virtuosic obsession, folding us into the warp and weft of unfamiliar zones. In contrast to the helmet-cam-style scrum of Son of Saul (2015), or the lucid calm before the storm of Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009), Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal lock us down with sunny yet cool imagery shot using wide lenses that keep the Hösses at arm’s length, especially, it seems, their faces. This quality of self-absorption is what Glazer’s film adapts, or adopts, from Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest, while discarding swaths of plot and people, including the officers and, well, the prisoners. Amis’s Time’s Arrow came to mind with its thought experiment of narrating the Holocaust backwards, in a cinematic reversal of its activity. Glazer’s film, too, feels like a self-contained exercise (at times flirting with dark-as-the-void satire).” (Nicolas Rapold, S&S Winter2023-24)

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

13.Challengers

Luca Guadagnino, US,Italy

Luca Guadagnino takes some big swings in this witty, frenetic three-hander starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, where the sexual tension plays out on and off the tenniscourt.

We said: “Confined to the dimensions of the court and the struggles of a magnetic ménage à trois, Guadagnino has returned to form, summoning the potent yearnings of his finest work, Call Me by Your Name (2017), and placing them in a major key. Challengers is a hot and heavy drama, but it’s also full of breezy wit and bizarre, borderline uncanny touches that, if they don’t always work, at least keep you on your toes, entertained. Tennis, in case it wasn’t obvious, represents desire, and it’s in this erotic vacuum that Guadagnino, with a nimble script written by Justin Kuritzkes, unleashes the film’s games, a hodgepodge of backstabbing, cuckolding, smack-talking and scheming that maintains the charged momentum of the match itself, the film’s framing device.” (Beatrice Loayza, S&SJune)

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

12. Evil Does NotExist

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi,Japan

Hamaguchi Ryūsuke follows Drive My Car (2021) with an ambiguous, elegantly told story of a lakeside community’s resistance to an intrusive corporate ‘glamping’development.

We said: “The mystery that Hamaguchi maintains around the direction of the film is sustained by Ishibashi Eiko’s shifting music, which creates a robust structure for the film quite apart from the dramatic development – almost as if it’s channelling the interiority of nature, and of a specific place, but even that feels like oversimplification, and the score can also cut out abruptly to unsettling effect. The ambiguous ending lands all the more jarringly after the preceding orchestration of mood and drama. Rather than frustrate, though, it feels like the kind of adventuresome move that might actually succeed in bottling something of the unpredictable nature of human behaviour. Evil Does Not Exist shows a filmmaker willing to muss up his own conceits and take gratifying risks when we might least expect them.” (Nicolas Rapold, S&SMarch)

Where to see it: On BFI Player and otherplatforms

11. I Saw the TVGlow

Jane Schoenbrun, US, UK

Reality and fantasy blur for two isolated suburban teens who bond over a mysterious, Buffy-esque 1990s TV show in Jane Schoenbrun’s fantastically inventive secondfeature.

We said: “The film plays with the now quaint textures of predigital viewing culture. Great attention has also gone into realising the saturated colours and analogue textures of the show within the movie, The Pink Opaque. Twin Peaks looms large, alongside other zeitgeist-grabbing 90s shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files: shows in which unorthodox leads confront uncanny threats and hidden realities whose irruption reveals the everyday world as a skimpy gauze stretching over unimaginable otherness. Especially salient is the resonance with trans experience. Owen and Maddy both read as queer and seemingly buried alive by their upbringings, aware of the possibility that a better reality might exist if one rouses the courage to kill off the fatally familiar in favour of the tantalisingly unknown.” (Ben Walters, S&SSeptember)

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

10. NickelBoys

RaMell Ross, US

RaMell Ross’s fiction debut is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel about two young men incarcerated in a brutal reform school in the1960s.

We said: “The visceral experience of the film feels like being plunged underwater on dry land, thrust into a world that can be decoded only through attentive looking and listening, a constant scanning of the horizon and repositioning of the heart. It is the story of a boy and his friend, Elwood, Hattie’s grandson (played by Ethan Herisse), and Turner (Brandon Wilson). In a sort of dark mirror-image of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, they’re trapped in an underworld (the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory) from which Hattie repeatedly tries and fails to rescue her grandson. With POV (point of view) fidelity, Ross plunges the audience into the viewpoint of these young men, seeing what they see, witnessing what they witness. Audiences find themselves moving restlessly, lyrically, lovingly, tragically, with a subjectivity that the long lens and partial views ensure. Nickel Boys invokes a world of lost innocence, lost life and transcendent redemption. (B. Ruby Rich, S&S Winter2024-25)

Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 3 January2025

9. No OtherLand

Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, Palestine,Norway

Filmed by media activists from both Israel and Palestine, this eloquent documentary captures the reality of a land struggle between resident Palestinians and the occupying Israeli forces seeking theirexpulsion.

We said: “No Other Land shows this slow ethnic cleansing on the ground, among Masafer Yatta’s residents from 2019 to late 2023, as IDF demolition raids tear down their homes and drive them into caves. The film’s rhythm is marked by staccato eruptions of violence as shock troops, armoured vehicles, bulldozers descend on a given village and smash classrooms, bathrooms, pigeon coops. One man is shot and paralysed as he tries to save his portable generator. This is difficult enough to watch. Imagine living it. (Nick Bradshaw, S&SDecember)

Where to see it: In UK cinemasnow

=7. Love LiesBleeding

Rose Glass, UK, US

Rose Glass follows up her horror debut Saint Maud (2019) with a disjointed but compelling 1980s-set crime thriller filled with blood, sex andbrawn.

We said: “Love Lies Bleeding again shows Glass’s fetishist’s eye at work, splashing her interest in perverse desire across a larger canvas, as she translates a story originally imagined in Scotland to the mythic American West. She cites Showgirls (1995) and Crash (1996) as influences – both are easily detected here, in the film’s depiction of the camp otherness of 1980s Americana and the performative world of bodybuilding, and in an undercurrent of grisly body horror, which bubbles to the surface as Jackie’s steroid dependence grows.” (Rachel Pronger, S&S Winter2024-25)

Where to see it: On major streaming servicesnow

=7. TheSubstance

Coralie Fargeat, UK, France, US

Demi Moore gives a winning performance as a fading Hollywood star who undergoes a grisly body-splitting treatment, but in its ‘monstering’ of the older female body, Coralie Fargeat’s film presents a confused argument about the politics ofageing.

We said: “The Substance contains a rich brew of cultural references. It made me think of the medieval ‘loathly lady’, who knows what women most desire – sovereignty and is given the choice of whether to be beautiful by day or night… Positioning the female reproductive body as prototype of all definitions of the monstrous in horror films, Barbara Creed’s critical study The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993) is a blueprint for Fargeat’s vision of a woman giving birth to her younger adult self and then ageing dreadfully. Above all this is cinema, and while her plot suggests John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), Fargeat has taken inspiration primarily from the 1980s, gleefully marrying Hollywood’s ‘body beautiful’ chick flick to its evil twin, body horror.” (Jane Giles, S&S Winter2024-25)

Where to see it: On Mubi and otherplatforms

6. Caught by theTides

Jia Zhang-ke,China

Jia Zhangke’s recurring character Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao) goes in search of her lover in this overly-familiar meditation on Chinese life, stitched together with footage from the director’s finestfilms.

We said: “Neither the decades-spanning time-scheme nor the motif of Zhao Tao searching for a man who’s left town are exactly new to Jia’s work. But in piecing together this narrative from unused footage from his own films (mostly – the final section is new), he’s found a suggestive way to rake over the coals, repurposing the raw material of a quarter of a century of filmmaking into a drifting, music-packed out-of-body reflection on the rapidity of change in modern China. Jia’s film is at once social history, a found-footage digest of his own career and, most affectingly, an intimate, cumulative, Boyhood-style portrait of his wife and frequent star ageing in real time. Zhao Tao’s character never speaks: she’s a mute wanderer through Jia’s outtakes, each frame capturing a wealth of documentary evidence of a nation undergoing transformative redevelopment and modernisation.” (Samuel Wigley, S&S WInter2024-25)

Where to seeit:

5. HardTruths

Mike Leigh, UK,Spain

Mike Leigh reteams with his Secrets and Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste for this story of two mismatched Afro-Caribbean British sisters and their families, Jean-Baptiste’s curdled Pansy and Michele Austin’s vivaciousChantelle.

We said: “Leigh’s trademark tragicomic blend is most present in the outrageous insults Pansy unleashes, no less funny for the hostility of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s delivery. It’s a fearless performance, perhaps encapsulated by a marvellous moment when she somehow laughs and cries at the same time. She’s matched step for step by Michele Austin; their scenes together, haunted by a shared, unresolved past, are the film’s high points. It’s easy to take Leigh’s work for granted, even minor-key projects such as this, but the hardest truth of all is how irreplaceable he still is in British cinema. Very few other contemporary filmmakers in this country are so prepared to confront with care and dignity people who others would cross the road to avoid, and to unpick the wayward threads of their fragile lives.” (Leigh Singer, S&S Winter2024-25)

Where to see it: In UK cinemas from 31 January2025

4.Dahomey

Mati Diop, France, Senegal, Benin, UK

Mati Diop skilfully blurs nonfiction and fantasy as the director charts the return of 26 royal artefacts looted from Dahomey during the French colonial invasion in the late 19thcentury.

We said: “It’s a characteristically hybrid project for the genre-defying filmmaker, blurring the bounds of nonfiction and fantasy. Diop and cinematographer Josephine Drouin Viallard chart the artefacts’ journey with what at first seems a curiously measured gaze, all sleek wide frames and minimal flourish. Along with Ghezo’s sombre musings, Wally Badarou and Dean Blunt’s electric, ghostly score with its tidal synths and alien inflections casts a dream-like veil over clinical proceedings: the fastidious care with which the sculptures are packaged, the forensic appraisal of their condition. Moments of emotion spill from the margins: the spirited parade that welcomes the looted treasures’ homecoming; nighttime sequences in the presidential gardens while Ghezo omnisciently surveys the transformed streets of his youth; the Beninese conservator who sings quietly to the recovered sculpture before him.” (Kelli Weston, S&SNovember)

Where to see it: OnMubi

3. Lachimera

Alice Rohrwacher, Italy, France, Switzerland,Turkey

Josh O’Connor plays a melancholic tombarolo who loots artefacts from ancient Tuscan burial sites in this joyous work of folkmagic.

We said: “No description of what happens in La chimera can adequately convey what happens in La chimera, which feels like watching ancient magic from the point of view of the spell. Arthur awakens to the realisation that his lifestyle is built on a desecration of the very things he loves. But Rohrwacher’s real story – splitting the difference between the earthiness of The Wonders (2014) and the whimsicality of Happy as Lazzaro (2018), and surpassing them both in vivid strangeness – is the story of the Tuscan ground and the beautiful secrets that sleep beneath our feet.” (Jessica Kiang, Sight and SoundJune)

Where to see it: On Mubi and otherplatforms

2.Anora

Sean Baker, US

Mikey Madison achieves instant star status as Ani, a funny, fiery Brooklyn sex worker who enters a whirlwind marriage with the spoiled son of a Russianoligarch.

We said: “Sean Baker’s fantastic Palme d’Or-winning screwball tragicomedy Anora plays like a dizzy homage to, and then a breakneck evisceration of, the whole Pretty Woman fantasy machine, electrified by a central character whose jaw-jutting attitude and brittle worldliness make her a Brighton Beach crazy-mirror Kit, raised to the power of a sweet smile that actually communicates ‘Just gimme my money, already.’ Anora (instant superstar Mikey Madison), her Brooklyn accent so laaawng and narrow it’s like she’s sucking all her vowels through a straw, dislikes her ‘shitty Uzbek name’ and insists on going by Ani. This makes the film’s title both a gentle rebuke and an affirmation – not the first time that Baker has displayed an uncanny knack for loving even those aspects of his characters that they cannot love about themselves. By turns swoony, funny, panicky and sad, this is the director’s most vivid creation yet.” (Jessica Kiang, S&SNovember)

Where to see it: In UK cinemasnow

1. All We Imagine asLight

Payal Kapadia, France, India, Netherlands, Luxembourg, US, Italy,Switzerland

In her Grand Prix-winning second feature, Indian director Payal Kapadia presents an inventive drama about three nurses navigating life in Mumbai that takes a poetic approach to expressing painfultruths.

We said: “From the outset, Kapadia establishes yearning – for love, and for an end to precarious living conditions – as her key theme. The film begins with footage of Mumbai accompanied by voiceovers reciting letters written by transplants to this ‘city of dreams’. The feelings of displacement being voiced are not attached to any specific authors – perhaps loneliness in urban India is a widespread affliction? – but Kapadia soon begins to focus her drama through three key characters, two nurses and a hospital cook who have moved to Mumbai fromelsewhere.

“Towards the end, the film abandons its metropolitan perspective for rural mysticism. A devastating, hallucinatory moment shifts the movie away from realism while reminding us that even the film’s more grounded, everyday scenes have had the slippery, unstable nature of a dream, or a memory. This surreal development recalls the cinema of transcendentalist motifs embraced, to varying degrees, by other Asian filmmakers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Lav Diaz. But All We Imagine as Light has a distinct feel. It is from very real circumstances, such as looming slum-clearances or economic migration, that the film’s more unreal nature is teased out.” (Arjun Sajip, S&SDecember)

Where to see it: In UK cinemasnow