Pajiba's Top Ten Films of 2024

As 2024 comes to an end, it can only mean one thing: list time! It’s mandatory. You have to rank all of your favourite things that happened or were released in that year. I don’t make the rules. This is just how the universe works.

It was an intriguing year for films. The impending Oscar race has a slew of frontrunners that includes body horror, political drama, biopics, and musicals. Sequels dominated the highest-grossing list once more, but there were some unexpected flops amid those supposed safe bets. We were not short of Discourse, but we were also blessed with some surprise gems and below-the-radar excitement. That makes the Pajiba top ten (well, 11, as you’ll see below) a fun mixture of mainstream stuff, international cinema, crowdpleasers, and offbeat choices. We shared our top tens, we tallied up the votes, and this is what we came up with: a 100% objective and irrefutable list.

8= THE FIRST OMEN

‘A dim, foggy alleyway lit by one lantern echoes the atmosphere of The Exorcist. Free’s transformative performance, both shocking and affecting in its intensity, echoes the feverish mania of Isabelle Adjani in Possession. A sense of claustrophobic distrust erupts and permeates throughout like Repulsion. The First Omen isn’t perfect by any means; it ends with unanswered questions, but it contains the strength and spirit of the classic horror films that came before it. It’s a dreadful, cursed mystery that harbors in the psychological and exposes the cracks of a putrid and decaying institution.’ (Review)

8= REBEL RIDGE

‘Saulnier is no stranger to unbearable tension and horrifying release, after all. As anyone who has seen one of the best films of the 21st century would attest, he is a modern master of it. François Truffaut famously once said that the very nature of cinema, with its focus on entertainment and heroic imagery, means that there can be no such thing as a truly ‘anti-war’ film. That’s a debate for another time, but a similar sentiment can be extended to other ‘heavy’ social issues like systemic racism and misogynistic violence. Where does righteous agitprop end and exploitation begin? Rebel Ridge manages to avoid this thorny boundary by not leaning too heavily on shocking imagery; rather, there is a constant and unyielding institutional and personal threat that hangs over proceedings, and the film is more effective for it.’ (Review)

8= PERFECT DAYS

‘This is a film that has affected me deeply. Premiering at the 76th Cannes Film Festival on 23rd May 2023, it picked up a Best Actor Award for Kōji Yakusho, and that prize couldn’t be more deserved. Yakusho delivers a truly astounding performance, bringing to life—largely with his expressions and body language!—an instantly iconic character with levels of humor and humanity that other actors could study. The subtlety and lyrical beauty of Perfect Days is going to stay with me for a long, long time. As will one of the one of the most remarkable ending shots in recent memory. See this film.’ (Review)

8= NOSFERATU

‘Eggers, tackling his dream project here (he’s been wanting to make his own Nosferatu since childhood), improbably manages to straddle his adaptation across the sweet spot chasm that separates two of its most notable forebears—his film feels like all the best aspects of Werner Herzog’s cold and dream-like Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) injected with all the lurid and horned-up bloodlust of Francis Ford Coppola’s delicious Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1992. Simultaneously hot and cold to the touch, this movie feels like a perverse spasm; an uncontrollable quiver in the loins seizing hold of us until our collective teeth are chattering. Delectably degenerate to its core, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu gets its rocks off with rot, decay, and necromantic corruption.’ (Review)

7: THE SUBSTANCE

‘The Substance feels sometimes lost in its own premise, beating the audience over the head with the metaphor, but it finds its footing in its final demented Cinderella story act. Throwing away any remaining subtlety, it nods to grotesque cohorts like Society before the curtain falls. Fargeat’s story is a visual one, the two lead women having limited dialogue (the two of them having almost no opportunity to converse with each other) and mostly reacting to the nightmares that surround them. The Substance is a bright pink gross-out spectacle of body horror craft that’ll forever change the way you look at a certain popular appendage.’ (Review)

6: A REAL PAIN

‘A Real Pain is a poignant exploration of intergenerational trauma within the Jewish community. It addresses how this trauma resurfaces and how individuals cope with it. The film poses some deep questions: How can we complain about the struggles we face in our lives when our ancestors had to endure far worse? Many of us lack knowledge of our family history, but we may still feel guilty about what’s happening around us. It can feel wrong to go to our mundane jobs when there’s so much devastation. We may feel helpless and uncertain about how to be happy when war and conflict are constantly displayed on our TV screens. These questions linger and make A Real Pain a profound viewing experience.’ (Review)

5: LA CHIMERA

‘It aches and yearns for many a lost past—where movies were feelings and meandered and sparkled and shone strange patterns; where people could find an abandoned building and make themselves a home. Where the very ground beneath our feet seemed full of mystery and possibility and history. A scene where these characters avoid swimming in a beautiful sea because the toxic waste will burn their skin, only to uncover the grandest treasure of their lives buried there beneath the sand and plastic bags and burned tires, feels like La Chimera in essence—sad and grand and mysterious, stumbling among the rubble into small pockets of intangible magic that disappear the second the light and the air hits them.’ (Review)

4: LOVE LIES BLEEDING

‘And it’s tempting here to use the Cronenbergian term “body horror” to describe how Love Lies Bleeding frame’s Jackie’s beefed-up metamorphosis, except one gets the sense that Glass doesn’t find this transformation altogether horrifying. It reads less Body Horror than it does Body Ecstasy. And that’s a neat trick the director pulled off in Saint Maud too—these women of Glass’ mold their bodies into what they need them to be, horror be damned, and they find the experience transcendent. While the process might be just as violent, where Jeff Goldblum’s Brundlefly had nowhere to go but Hell, Glass’ ladies smash their ways straight into their own little Heavens.’ (Review)

3: ANORA

‘Anora feels like the perfect combination of screwball comedy and New Hollywood cinema. It feels very ’70s in both style and sensibility. How it plays with color and light elevates every setting and it’s a film that feels grounded in its cinematography. It has a natural fluidity in dialogue and composition that feels almost docu-style, like the 1970s taste for realism. It’s also New Hollywood in that it’s adventurous with its narrative and captures characters on the fringes of society. It also proves to be a fantastic screwball showcase in its writing and performances, especially from Madison. The scene in which Ani and Ivan are confronted by the three Russian goons includes all the screwball musts like fast-paced dialogue, a physical battle of the sexes and simply playing on the humor of the ridiculous hunt that ensues for Ivan. Madison meets the repartee of someone like Carole Lombard or Rosalind Russell, which takes the film’s comedy to further heights.’ (Review)

2: I SAW THE TV GLOW

‘Owen and Maddie’s journeys do eventually find their way back to one another, but what’s real or not no longer coheres. Time passes in fits and starts—characters age in artificial spurts like a Charlie Kaufman movie. Gray stage-paint streaked hair passes for an epoch. The forage for one’s self, I Saw the TV Glow argues, is neverending; a search party lost in the woods with their flashlights blinking out one by one, mostly fresh blackness rising up to fill the spots where infinitesimal flashes of understanding once stood. We ache across the years with only questions for our questions. Who we thought we were yesterday slipped away in the night; there’s a stranger in the mirror staring back at us every morning. Selfhood, the great and terrible fantasia. A hiss of static spilling from between our teeth in place of words. And for this, we apologize. And after the Late Show, we dig our own graves again, night after night, after night.’ (Review)

1: CONCLAVE

‘We are used to seeing division brought out in politics. We are often made to decide between two candidates on opposite sides. This divide, also seen in the film, creates conflict inside and outside political houses - wars of hate that are difficult to temper. Conclave, one of the year’s best films, is a direct comparison to what has been seen in the United States, especially concerning the upcoming election. One side defines a country by the history of its past, while the other defines a country by the history it has yet to create. It’s up to those with the vote to decide which history they want to be a part of.’ (Review)