Here we have my choices for the greatest films of 2024, which are not to be confused with my favorites. What’s the difference? Put it this way: Schindler’s List is a great movie, but ain’t nobody putting it on to unwind after a hard day. This is a list about the awards favorites, the critical darlings, the films that are destined to be film school staples in the years to come.

Best Epic

Yes, Wicked was the film this year that made me openly weep the hardest. Even so, I’m withholding my judgment until the second part comes out next year. There’s still plenty of time for the filmmakers to get tripped up in the difficulties of adapting the source material, choking on their own ambitions and delivering a film that’s merely passable instead of living up to the expectations of the first part — just look at how Dune: Part Two ended up.

I had a hard time putting my finger on exactly why Gladiator II didn’t work for me, until a friend of mine pointed out that queerness only exists when it’s coded for villainy, women only exist as motivation for the male characters, and everything the villains do is only evil until the hero does it. Granted, a lot of that is carried over from the first movie, but the subtext hasn’t aged well and I can’t unsee that. And anyway, I’d frankly argue that The Return is the better historical epic, even if the runtime and scope of that movie aren’t quite big enough to merit the label.

It’s lamentably easy to forget that Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga came out in 2024. I can only assume WB tanked that movie for the tax write-offs (or maybe Mad Max: Fury Road aged worse post-COVID than anyone realized), because that movie deserved so much better than it got.

Even so, if we’re talking about epic movies destined to be studied and revered as all-time exemplars of the medium, it has to be The Brutalist. There’s no getting around the fact that some mad genius found a way to keep an immigrant story compelling for three and a half hours solid, while also delivering fantastic production design and inspired editing, while also directing a handful of seasoned talents to career-best performances, WHILE ALSO keeping the budget under $10 million. I don’t know how the filmmakers did all of that, but it deserves serious acclaim.

Best Light Drama

Literally the only thing holding back The Last Showgirl is the inexperience of the director, who got saved by a fantastic script and a cast of incredible performers. And speaking of sex workers, Anora turned out to be a genuinely endearing work that was smart and sexy, funny as it was brutal.

We also got A Real Pain, which turned out to be a sweet little cathartic comedy about family drama and generational trauma by way of the Holocaust. And of course we’ve got Thelma, a delightful picture about aging with grace as only June Squibb could deliver. Last but not least is My Old Ass, a stellar coming-of-age dramedy with an inspired time-traveling hook and a twist of LGBTQ+ theming.

This is a heartbreakingly difficult call, and all of these movies deserve to be listed among the year’s best. My Old Ass is easily my favorite of the bunch, arguably the most inspiring and uplifting one of the lot. But for the Masterpieces list, the one that exemplifies filmmaking at its best… I’m sorry, but Anora is simply too damn good. The camerawork, the editing, the soundtrack, the casting, the script loaded with so many ingenious twists and turns, the list goes on and on.

Again, I genuinely love all the movies in this category, but strictly in terms of filmmaking craft, Anora is simply on another level.

Best Heavy Drama

The Brutalist gets another obligatory mention here, but no way in hell am I giving that movie two awards. Conclave has been picking up a number of awards and nominations in recent months, and it’s certainly a great movie, but… I dunno, it seemed a little stiff and repetitive. But at least it wasn’t as stiff or low-key as Small Things Like These, which was somehow even more depressing and came with an even dimmer view of the Catholic Church.

It’s another tough call, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and pick the film that nobody’s heard of: Exhibiting Forgiveness. Another depressing and difficult movie tinged with themes of religious hypocrisy, but at least the scale is confined to the drama of one particular family, rather than the entire Catholic Church, which makes it a bit easier to swallow. Of course, it certainly helps that we’ve got so many talented actors eating their own hearts out by way of a fantastic script. But what really sets this movie above and apart from the others here is its ingenious use of paintings and drawings. It brings a level of innovation and creativity like nothing I saw from any of the others in this lane (though The Brutalist came close).

Best Coming-of-Age Drama

This might be the single hardest choice in my entire year-end retrospective. I dearly love all of these movies with all my heart, and every single one deserves mention among the year’s best.

We got Ezra, the achingly poignant (yet deeply flawed) movie about the difficulties of parenting an autistic kid. We got Didi, the semi-autobiographical portrait of growing up as an immigrant kid, compounded by the difficulties of growing up in the social media age. We got My Old Ass, the aforementioned bittersweet comedy about the fleeting nature of time. We got A Fire Inside, a thoroughly kickass sports biopic that subverts its own genre in so many genius ways.

This was an incredible year for coming-of-age dramas, with so many films that broke the mold and made an impression, even with all the many wonderful films we’ve seen in this lane over the past few years. It genuinely breaks my heart that I can only give top honors to one of them, and it has to be Didi. This is a movie about a kid learning about who he is as an immigrant, as an artist, as a product of generational trauma, and as a young man coming into his own sexually. This movie covers so much ground, covers it all so tastefully and adeptly, with such heart and intelligence and craftsmanship, it has to take top honors.

Best Nonsequential Romantic Drama

Yeah. In this crazy year, we got so many romantic dramas told in non-sequential order, they took up their own category.

Here was a notable entry, but the characters were all so flat and the story was so thinly-spread that the movie was more of a technical demo than anything else. We also got Challengers, but that was really more about three people ripping each other to shreds over 130 minutes. By comparison, We Live in Time is a more straightforward tearjerker that follows the entire process of two people falling in love, literally from the meet-cute start to the tragic finish.

The only reason I’m not giving this one to We Live in Time is because it doesn’t really say anything new. It’s superbly made and undeniably effective, yes, but there’s not much of anything memorable about it except for the non-chronological plot. Compare that to Challengers, a far more bold and aggressive movie that takes bigger risks and somehow manages to pull them off. I’d be far more interested to study Challengers, watching it repeatedly to try and pick it apart and figure out how the hell it works as well as it does. Challengers takes it.

Best Crime Thriller

Drive-Away Dolls is a sexy, funny, heartfelt movie with so many parts that failed to mesh into a cohesive whole. It speaks volumes that the movie actually directed by Ethan Coen wasn’t even the best Coen Brothers movie this year — that was Greedy People, a cute little caper that didn’t really accomplish much aside from working as an uncanny Coen Brothers riff.

Take the best aspects of both those movies, put them together, juice it all up with literal buckets full of actual steroids, and you’ve got Love Lies Bleeding. Deftly handled, superbly performed, and expertly provocative. It’s a deeply visceral erotic same-sex romance that’s also a damn fine crime thriller.

Best Animated Feature

Such a crying shame Moana 2 didn’t go direct-to-streaming as a miniseries, because that’s really the only way it could’ve reached its full potential. Even then, Moana never needed a sequel, and the filmmakers did the best they could with what the studio mandated they should deliver. By contrast, Inside Out 2 botched the premise of the original film with its insensitive — maybe even harmful — depiction of dealing with mental disorders like anxiety.

Outside of Disney, this was the year that brought us Flow, a movie with magnificent animation and too many outlandish ideas to sufficiently explain without any dialogue. I was honestly much more impressed with Transformers One, an overblown toy commercial that depicted the origin stories of Optimus Prime and Megatron. Literally nobody asked for this movie, yet it turned out to be surprisingly well-acted and animated, with impressively deep themes about corruption by way of power.

Unfortunately, Transformers One is held back by an ungodly annoying portrayal of Bumblebee and a pathetically flat female lead. So I’m giving this one to The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. Another franchise origin story that nobody asked for, turned out far better than it had any right to, and it unfairly tanked at the box office… but at least it doesn’t have any annoying and unnecessary comic relief.

That said, you may have noticed a far superior animated film from 2024 that didn’t even get a mention here. Well…

Greatest Masterpiece

Even all this time later, I still have a hard time finding the words to sufficiently describe The Wild Robot. Everything in this movie is peak cinema. The voice acting is marvelous, the animation is spellbinding, the scope is epic, the soundtrack is soaring, the action is breathtaking, the script is compelling, the threadbare themes are somehow made into something new and fresh and heartfelt… I don’t know how they did it. It simply should not be possible to cram in so much awesomeness and do so many things so insanely well with only 100 minutes of screentime.

Literally nobody expected this movie to do well and it somehow came out perfectly. In a year with so many films that underperformed or unfairly bombed, it was so beautifully uplifting to see The Wild Robot turn into the sleeper hit of the year, with near-universal critical praise and immediate box office success. This has to be the greatest film of the year.

And now for the Disappointments. Buckle up and hold on, everyone…