The best movies of 2024 –

(05) Love Lies Bleeding

Sometimes it’s nice to have a film that just dares to be itself, and Saint Maud director Rose Glass’ latest cinematic experiment Love Lies Bleeding was just the refreshing kick we needed in this lean year for cinema. Like Kristen Stewart’s character, we fell head over heels for the film’s veined muscle, which confidently took one twisted turn after another, offering a dripping, sweaty revenge thriller that blended the Coen brothers’ hardboiled tone, drive, excessive violence and a heavy dose of steroids. A raw, surreal beast that we couldn’t take our eyes off and that had a nervous, nail-biting pulse behind its hypnotic surface. Love Lies Bleeding was, in other words, a feverish femme fatale dream that we thought had all the potential to become a future cult classic.

(04) Civil War

When Alex Garland announced to the world press before the theatrical premiere of the war film Civil War that he was retiring as a director with this film and only planned to continue as a screenwriter, many of us began a sort of somber grieving process. This is because with Ex Machina and this one, Garland proved that he is not only technically proficient and smart in his storytelling, but also absolutely brilliant at believably intense characterizations and gripping dramaturgy.

(03) Grounded

With The Substance, Coralie Fargeat took us on a dizzying journey that not only captivated us with its visual splendor, but also dared to tell a story that went straight to the soul. A nod to the beauty industry and Hollywood that surprised and held us in its iron grip time and again. We loved how the subtle nuances of the script never detracted from the audience’s intelligence, not to mention how the unpredictable twists kept us on the edge of our seats from the first scene to the last. But what really took The Substance to the next level was the fact that the extra meaty, laugh-out-loud body horror-fest felt almost as good as The Fly or Re-Animator.

(02) The wild robot

After the first trailer was released, some of us on the editorial staff dismissed the new film from Lilo & Stitch man Chris Sander, calling it a seemingly bad Iron Giant copy. Nothing could have been more wrong. The Wild Robot not only stood on its own two feet, it was steeped in balanced, emotionally measured and tear-jerking storytelling, strong characters, successful humor and phenomenally beautiful aesthetics.

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(01) Dune: part two

It’s fair to say that Denis Villeneuve has made the impossible possible again, and we don’t just mean that he managed to film an incredibly complex novel; He managed to make going to the cinema more relevant than ever. When was the last time we actually had such a good time at the cinema? We were completely enthralled on our second visit to Dune, as we still haven’t been able to let go of Arrakis since its premiere. Like an herb-soaked dream, we remembered the desert planet as if we were there ourselves, riding Shai-Hulud, battling the oppressed Fremen and witnessing a messiah figure come to life. While many other studios tried to mimic tired movie recipes, Villeneuve went his own way with a confident science fiction with dignity, translating Frank Herbert’s gritty dystopia with accuracy and a deep understanding of the author’s philosophy. We could have had the editor’s biggest Dune fanatic, André, write column after column about Dune’s true greatness, but suffice it to say that the title of best film of the year was more than deserved. Great films don’t get better than this.