20. GOOD ONE (DIR. INDIA DONALDSON) 

A smart, subtle drama about gender dynamics, Donaldson’s debut feature stars Lily Collias as Sam, a wise 18-year-old who spends a weekend hiking with her father and his out-of-touch male buddy. First you notice how Sam, who is gay, cooks for the two older men, adopting the stereotypical mother role of the dynamic. Then the film enters rich, unexpected territory that will have you wanting to rewatch it all over again.

Good One comes out in UK cinemas in early 2025. Look out for our interview with India Donaldson

19. VICTORY (DIR. PARK BEOM-SU)

Cheerleading isn’t really that popular in Korea. Nevertheless, director Park sought to make his own version of Bring It On, resulting in a fun, sharp, 1999-set comedy about teenage outsiders in Geoje who form their own cheerleading society at school. Starring Park Se-wan and the chart-topping musician Lee Hye-ri, the crowdpleaser is full of slapstick, impressive choreography, and kinetic humour to accompany the K-pop tunes.

Victory doesn’t currently have UK distribution

18. ARCHITECTON (DIR. VICTOR KOSSAKOVSKY)

Some films only work on the big screen. An often wordless documentary about rocks, Kossakovsky’s tone poem of a feature is absolutely hypnotic, awe-inspiring, and, in the best way, perplexing. It’s mostly shots of ruins and stones, so why was seeing it at BFI IMAX one of my highlights of the year? Well, the remnants of old, ancient buildings allow for a reflection on bygone eras, while Kossakovsky not-so-subtly critiques how cement is destroying the natural world. It rocks!

Architecton is out in UK cinemas on January 10, 2025

17. DUNE: PART TWO (DIR. DENIS VILLENEUVE)

If Part One felt at all like homework, then Part Two is the payoff that ups the “how did they shoot that?” action, the quotable lines, and the shots of Timothée Chalamet riding a sandworm. Balancing the intergalactic storytelling with moments of quiet poetry on Arrakis, Villeneuve shoots his sci-fi blockbuster like an arthouse filmmaker operating on an unlimited budget. Highlights range from Josh Brolin playing the baliset, to Austin Butler facing off against Chalamet in a knife fight that makes Gladiator II look embarrassing in comparison.

16. FLOW (DIR. GINTS ZILBALODIS)

Set amidst an unnamed environmental disaster, Flow is a hypnotic, wordless animation from Latvia that has no humans, just animals attempting to survive the wreckage of manmade climate change. The protagonist in this arthouse thriller is a CG cat who begrudgingly joins forces with a capybara, a lemur, a dog, and a crane to survive biblical flooding. With its PlayStation 2-esque visuals, it’s absolutely transcendent.

Flow comes out in UK cinemas on March 21. Look out for our interview with Gints Zilbalodis

15. PAVEMENTS (DIR. ALEX ROSS PERRY)

The most I’ve laughed in a cinema all year, Pavements is first and foremost a comedy. Described by Perry as his version of Dunkirk, the subversive faux-documentary about the 90s indie band Pavement is multiple movies that run simultaneously: a behind-the-scenes retelling of a fake Pavement biopic starring Joe Keery as Stephen Malkmus; the staging of a musical based on the group’s discography; a reworking of a previous Pavement doc, Slow Century; interviews with the band in a fake reality where they’re bigger than The Beatles.

Pavements will come out in UK cinemas in 2025

14. THE BRUTALIST (DIR. BRADY CORBET)

By now, you’ve heard that The Brutalist is 215 minutes long, it requires a 15-minute interval, and the only way it should be seen is projected on 70mm. That’s all true, especially the 70mm part, but the film itself is a decades-spanning period drama that boasts a jaw-dropping leap performance and will have you re-examining every building around you. Starring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian architect who survives the Holocaust and travels to New York for a new life, Corbet’s novelistic feature is a succession of thrilling images that are matched only by the intensity of the characters’ overflowing emotions.

The Brutalist comes out in UK cinemas on January 24, 2025. Look out for our interview with Brady Corbet

13. LA CHIMERA (DIR. ALICE ROCHRWACHER)

La Chimera delves into Italy’s Great Raid, a 1980s phenomenon where tombaroli (tomb raiders) plundered sacred Etruscan tombs, untouched for over 2,000 years. Driven by the hyper-capitalism of the era, they sold ancient relics on the black market. At its heart is Arthur, a British archaeologist-turned-tombaroli, gifted with an uncanny ability to find these tombs. A modern-day Orpheus, he embarks on a purgatorial quest to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead.

The film explores themes beyond one man’s search for his lost love – probing our connection to the past, the emptiness of materialism, and the magic of the unseen. Like Rohrwacher’s earlier works, Heavenly Body, The Wonders and Happy As Lazzaro, it is a soulful response to the materialistic, patriarchal status quo. (DS)

12. KNEECAP (DIR. RICH PEPPIATT)

If it’s good enough to piss off Tory party leader Kemi Badenoch, then it’s good enough for me. Belfast’s Irish-language revivalist rap trio Kneecap have had an incredible year in 2024, with their sophomore, Toddla T-produced album Fine Art dropping in June, and their semi-autobiographical film cleaning up at the British Independent Film Awards earlier this month (not to mention being included in our Dazed 100 list). The film is a slightly embellished account of the group’s formation, which saw an unlikely union between former music teacher DJ Provaí (36) and rappers Móglaí Bap (30) and Mo Chara (26), and the subsequent mayhem they unleashed at shows across the globe. What is truly impressive about the film, however, is its ability to handle the notoriously complex cultural politics of Northern Ireland with both humour and grace, emerging as a wholly uncontentious ode to protecting indigenous cultures and languages. (SPM)

11. NO OTHER LAND (DIR. BASEL ADRA, HAMDAN BALLAL, YUVAL ABRAHAM, RACHEL SZOR)

A collaboration between Palestinian and Israeli activists, No Other Land is an incisive, powerful documentary about ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank. Taking place over several years, the film collates devastating footage of Israeli forces violently evicting residents of Masafer Yatta, a collection of 19 Palestinian villages. The brutality is close to unwatchable, which is what makes it so valuable as documented evidence that can’t, and shouldn’t, be ignored.

Read our interview with Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham here

10. BABYGIRL ( DIR. HALINA REIJN)

Babygirl is sexy, stylish and funny, but what really sets it apart is the chemistry between its two lead actors (Kidman, veering between abjection and steely self-control, is incredible.) “The high-powered businesswoman who secretly craves sexual domination” is by a now familiar trope, but Babygirl goes some way towards subverting it, showing that sexual fantasies can rarely be enacted in reality without friction: it’s a sexy film, for sure, but the dom-sub dynamic between Kidman (the CEO of a tech firm) and Harris Dickinson (who plays a young intern) is often depicted as stilted, awkward, contrived and kind of goofy, while Dickinson’s character, rather than being a one-note Christian Gray archetype, is far more compelling for his moments of vulnerability. (JG)

9. ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (DIR. PAYAL KAPADIA)

A mesmerising Mumbai tale of female friendship, Kapadia’s gorgeous second feature documents both the suffocation of loneliness for underpaid city workers and also the escapism of pure romance. Estranged from her husband, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) accompanies two hospital co-workers on a trip to the Indian coast where the drama unravels and even dives into magical realism. An utter dream of a film.

Read our interview with Payal Kapadia and Kani Kusruti here

8. THE SUBSTANCE (DIR. CORALIE FARGEAT)

In the months since I first watched The Substance, I’ve become less and less convinced by it as a feminist satire (if you can even call it that.) But as a rollicking good time at the movies, I remain its most ardent defender: the score, the costume design and the visual storytelling are all wildly entertaining. It is a very funny film, but Demi Moore’s performance also lends it moments of real depth – particularly the scene where she is getting ready for a date, staring into a mirror with a look of visceral self-hatred and smearing her face with make-up so violently it’s as though she’s trying to tear off her own skin. While The Substance offers plenty of grotesque laughs, this is one of the saddest things I’ve seen on screen all year. (JG)

7 / 6. CHALLENGERS AND QUEER (DIR. LUCA GUADAGNINO)

Just as Guadagnino shot Suspiria a few months after Call Me By Your Name, the Italian director was on the set of Challengers when he asked the film’s screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes if he could also write Queer. One is a very modern, tennis-themed love triangle starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist in which no one has sex on screen; the other is a fornication-filled, 1950s-set adaptation of William S. Burroughs with Daniel Craig as a writer whose addiction to heroin is matched by his addiction to a young man played by Drew Starkey. Both showcase delightful Guadagnino touches where every object is beautiful, purposeful, or full of utter sadness.

Read Another Man’s interview with Mike Faist on Challengers here, and read Dazed’s interview with Drew Starkey on Queer here

5. I SAW THE TV GLOW (DIR. JANE SCHOENBRUN)

If any film from 2024 is destined to be a cult classic, it’s Schoenbrun’s horror-tinged teen movie about outsiders seeking connection over The Pink Opaque, a forgotten, fictional TV show from the ‘90s. Starring Brigette Lundy-Paine and Justice Smith, the psychological drama sees its characters debate their contrasting memories, if their surroundings are real, and why nothing feels quite right inside their bodies. Schoenbrun, a trans director, has described the film as being about their own transness, and the film itself is a shapeshifting marvel that’s haunting, hypnotising, and somehow able to seamlessly have both Phoebe Bridgers and Fred Durst in its cast. There’s nothing else like it, not even The Pink Opaque.

Read our interview with Jane Schoenbrun here

4. GRAND TOUR (DIR. MIGUEL GOMES)

Gomes’s black-and-white odyssey is a film that lulls in viewers with its deep curiosity for the world at large. In 1918, a civil servant, Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), abandons his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) to travel across Asia, and so he embarks on a series of tragicomic vignettes that are interspersed with documentary footage. Meanwhile, Molly treks from country to country in search of Edward, only to find herself trapped in a surreal nightmare with overwhelming loneliness. As depressing as it is beautiful.

Grand Tour will come out in UK cinemas in 2025

3. NOSFERATU (DIR. ROBERT EGGERS)

With a love triangle almost as toxic as Challengers, Nosferatu is a gloriously messed-up horror that has a young woman, Ellen (Lily-Ross Depp), attempting to choose between her ineffectual husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), and the undead, rotting hunk that is Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). It has all the exquisiteness and grotesquerie that you’d want from the director of The Lighthouse.

Nosferatu is out in UK cinemas on January 1, 2025. Look out for our interview with Robert Eggers

2. NICKEL BOYS (DIR. RAMELL ROSS)

Rewriting cinematic language with its constant POV shots and woven-in archival footage, Nickel Boys is a jaw-dropping piece of art that raises a question: why do so many movies have to look the same? Sick of the standard “shot, reverse shot” pattern, Ross adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel so that nearly every image is from the point of view of one its two young Black leads, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). (Imagine Terrence Malick directing Peep Show, but the story is based on abuse suffered by Black kids at the Dozier School in Florida, a real institution where bodies with bullet wounds were discovered in the soil.) The film’s POV shots are not only immersive, they also depict a Black kid realising for the first time he’s Black. As Ross told Dazed: “There’s nothing in the film that has single purpose. All the images have to be doing more than just narrative.”

Nickel Boys comes out in UK cinemas on January 3, 2025. Look out for our interview with RaMell Ross

1. ANORA (DIR. SEAN BAKER)

It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and your friends won’t shut up about it, even if it’s just to argue about the ending. A riotous crowd-pleaser with a Take That needle drop, Anora soars to extraordinary emotional heights thanks to Mikey Madison as Ani, a sex worker who impulsively marries a Russian oligarch’s son, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), and then witnesses her Cinderella dream crumble when he vanishes. Hilarious and heartbreaking, Madison is a heel-wearing hurricane who butts heads, sometimes literally, with an exquisite supporting cast whose comedic timing is all on point. A related piece of trivia: someone vomits in all of Baker’s movies, and it’s nearly always the funniest moment.

Read our interview with Mikey Madison here and Sean Baker here