Parallax View’s Best of 2024

A belated welcome to 2025 with one last look at the best releases of 2024

Most of us at parallax View are no longer actively reviewing new films but we still try to keep up with them. And after decades of making lists like this, it’s still part of our routine. So while, even halfway through January 2025, we are still catching up on some of the most celebrated films of 2024, we can’t help ourselves. Though far from definitive, please enjoy our picks for the best films of 2024.

Contributors in alphabetical order. Films list in preferential order (unless otherwise noted).

Sean Axmaker

1. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)
2. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
3. His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs)
4. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammed Rasoulof)
5. Anora (Sean Baker)
6. A Complete Unknown (James Mangold)
7. Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)
8. Green Border (Agnieszka Holland)
9. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass)
10. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)

Runners-up: Challengers (Luca Guadagnino), Cuckoo (Tilman Singer), The Dead Don’t Hurt (Viggo Mortensen), Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude), Hit Man (Richard Linklater), Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood), A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg), Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier), Strange Darling (JT Mollner), Woman of the Hour (Anna Kendrick)

Adrien Brody in ‘The Brutalist.’ Photo credit: A24

Dennis Cozzalio

My usual baker’s dozen of end-of-the-year picks features an actual Baker this year, so what a way to start! I have not yet had the opportunity to see such highly touted year-end powerhouses as All We Imagine as Light, Nickel Boys, The Brutalist or Hard Truths, though Sing Sing and The Room Next Door are both on my dance card for this weekend, a couple days after the deadline to submit this list. As with every year’s list, this one seems to change from moment to moment, so it only seems like business as usual, with those six in mind as possible spoilers for the ones that did make my list of 13 Favorites of 2024, that this list might look entirely different at the end of the coming weekend, or a week or from now. But this is what it looks like at 6:44 a.m. on Thursday, January 16, 2025. I have attempted to rank them, but in all honesty, only the top three are in any way carved in granite as far as their placement on the list goes. The remaining ten could be reshuffled in as many ways mathematically as they could be reshuffled. What matters is that they are all there.

My Baker’s Dozen Favorites of 2025
1. The Beast (Bertrand Bonello)
2. Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)
3. La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)
4. Anora (Sean Baker)
5. His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs)
6. Hundreds Of Beavers (Mike Cheslik)
7. The Old Oak (Ken Loach)
8. Small Things Like These (Tim Mielants)
9. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller)
10. Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos)
11. Last Summer (Catherine Breillat)
12. September 5 (Tim Fehlbaum)
13. Ghostlight (Alex Thompson, Kelly O’Sullivan)

In so many ways 2024 has been a terror, but as far as movies go it has good enough that another list of ten easily populates the world of my honorable mentions. In any other less bountiful year, any of these (listed alphabetically) might have made my baker’s dozen.

A Complete Unknown (James Mangold), A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg), Challengers (Luca Guadagnino), Conclave (Edward Berger), Daddio (Christy Hall), The First Omen (Arkasha Stevenson), Heretic (Scott Beck, Bryan Woods), Hit Man (Richard Linklater), Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood), My Old Ass (Megan Park)

Documentaries I Enjoyed Most:
The Disappearance Of Shere Hite (2023) (Nicole Newnham), Ghost: Rite Here Rite Now (Tobias Forge, Alex Ross Perry), Made In England: The Films of Powell And Pressburger (David Hinton), Rainier: A Beer Odyssey (Isaac Olsen), Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (Garret Price)

And Every Year Has Its Dregs (In Descending Order From Best-Worst To Worst-Worst):
Gladiator 2 (Ridley Scott) Tired, dull and pointless. Denzel ashington is, as widely reported, the best thing in it, and he’s still not very good.
Trap (M. Night Shyamalan) Substitute “C” for “T.” The movie that answers the question, “What would it be like to see Hayley Mills taser a shirtless serial killer nearly half her age. Answer: not as enticing as it might sound, which is a reasonable response to the whole dumb movie itself.
Joker: Folie A Deux (Todd Phillips) A “fuck you” to the same audience Phillips courted all the way to the Oscars before, but it has no passion for its own conceits, especially the musical numbers.
The Front Room (Max Eggers, Sam Eggers) Ugliest display of fear of the elderly I’ve seen in a movie in quite some time. And Brandy Norwood can’t act.
Deadpool & Wolverine (Shawn Levy) Marvel eats itself.

David Coursen

1. The Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
2. Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof)
3. Green Border (Agnieszka Holland)
4. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
5. Evil Does Not Exist (Ruyusuke Hamaguchi)
6. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)
7. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
8. Dahomey (Mati Diop)
9. Fire Within, A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (Werner Herzog)
10. (tie) The People’s Joker (Vera Drew)
Witches (Elizabeth Sankey)

Kathy Fennessy

(as posted on andmoreagain)

1. Janet Planet (Annie Baker)
2. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
3. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass)
4. Red Rooms (Pascal Plante)
5. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
6. Between the Temples (Nathan Silver)
7. Dead Man’s Switch / Arillo de hombre muerto (Alejandro Gerber Bicecci)
8. Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier)
9. The Vourdalak (Adrien Beau)
10. MaXXXine (Ti West)

Demi Moore in ‘The Substance.’ Photo credit: MUBI

Robert Horton

(as posted on The Crop Duster)

Top tier:
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
Last Summer (Catherine Breillat)
Green Border (Agnieska Holland)
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs)

Veteran Virtuosity tier:
Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)
Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)
Hit Man (Richard Linklater)
Trap (M. Night Shyamalan)

Wild + Crazy Virtuosity tier:
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)
Anora (Sean Baker)
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

Strong Enough to Honor tier:
A Complete Unknown (James Mangold)
Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Sing Sing (Greg Kweder)
Nightbitch (Marielle Heller)

Sam Malone and Ethan Herisse in ‘Nickel Boys.’ Photo credit: Amazon MGM Studios

Richard T. Jameson

Not for the first time, I spent the greater part of a film year with a Netflix miniseries poised ahead of everything else on a potential “best things seen on screen” list: Steven Zaillian’s mesmerizing Ripley. In spirit, it’s still there. As for mere movies, here’s an alphabetical Ten (or so) Best.

All We Imagine as Light
Anora
The Brutalist
Evil Does Not Exist
Flow
His Three Daughters
Juror No. 2
Last Summer…
Nickel Boys
Strange Darling
The Substance

Least celebrated also-rans: The Animal Kingdom, The Dead Don’t Hurt, Handling the Undead, Horizon (part one), Monkey Man, Rebel Ridge

Moira Macdonald

Favorite Films of 2024, listed alphabetically (as published in The Seattle Times):
The Crime Is Mine
Evil Does Not Exist
His Three Daughters
Hit Man
Nickel Boys
A Real Pain
Sweetheart Deal
The Taste of Things
Wicked