The 25 Best Films of 2024 - Slant Magazine (2025)

Many of our favorite films of 2024 mined our collective historical and cinematic past in varied, fascinating ways. No less than two films on our list renegotiated the lingering after effects of the Holocaust, while two others daringly confronted our preconceptions of popular on-screen sexual pairings. Still others found characters forced to return to a hometown they’d long left behind or to grapple with disappearances from decades earlier.

Yet, for all their looking back, these films don’t engage in thoughtless nostalgia for an earlier time. Rather, they’re in conversation with the past in ways that not only illuminate it, but arm audiences with new ideas, understandings, and concepts that help them navigate the horrors of the world when the past inevitably threatens to repeat itself. Even a film set in the past and that is, among many other things, about the allure and pitfalls of nostalgia, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is very much about how we choose to live in the now.

Of course, plenty of our favorite films of the year also directly engage with our bewildering present and the complex moral quandaries and burgeoning sense of hopelessness that have arisen in the age of AI, ever-worsening climate change, mass migration, obscene wealth inequality, and cultural homogenization. Radu Jude’s uproarious Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World boldly confronts the ways in which such ever-present stressors are internalized by people and are often released, or perhaps regurgitated, in the only way the powerless masses can: as grist for the social media content mill.

Meanwhile, other films, like those directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Bertrand Bonello, rendered the abject terror of living through tumultuous, unpredictable times as a horror every bit as nebulous and inscrutable to us as it is to the characters at their center. All this is to say that our favorite films of 2024 put to shame the notion that cinema is dying. If anything, these films prove not only how vital cinema is as an antidote to the IP-driven behemoths dominating multiplexes, but as critical reminders of what is to be human and the mysterious, emboldening power we attain from engaging with and creating art. Derek Smith

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25. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)

A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s follow-up to When You Finish Saving the World, is a cavalcade of angst and agony, from the familial to the historical, with an occasionally quite bleak assessment of the human condition. But it’s also levitated by a joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance. A Real Pain isn’t a film that embraces easy answers or platitudes. Even after David (Eisenberg), a digital ad salesman, reveals so much of his and his cousin Benjy’s (Kieran Culkin) past in a monologue to the other members of their tour group in Poland, it doesn’t seem clear how they’ll move forward. You sense that, after their trip, the two may have a better understanding of the pain they carry but that they still won’t know how to escape it. Chris Barsanti

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24. Hit Man (Richard Linklater)

With Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, Glen Powell has been offered a plum opportunity to shape his image into something more complicated and often poignant. Powell stars as Gary Johnson, a philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans who moonlights as a pretend hitman in sting operations. That premise may seem far-fetched, but the script gives a logical pathway for Johnson’s nerdy tech hobby to seem appealing to the Nola police department’s surveillance teams. And, also, this story mostly really happened. As early as , Linklater has been most preoccupied with the self and identity and their coherence and mutability. Many of Linklater’s films are united by their celebration of the pretentious in its etymological meaning of “playing pretend.” With Hit Man, he and Powell take this further by demonstrating that acting isn’t just entertainment or art—it’s also a fundamental part of our lives. Zach Lewis

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23. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)

Now that the furor over Warner Bros.’s approach to the release of Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2—essentially treating the possibly final work from a Hollywood legend as just another piece of streaming content—has died down, one can focus on the film itself and appreciate its quietly powerful strengths. Working from Jonathan A. Abrams’s terrifically nuanced screenplay, Eastwood uses the conventions of legal thrillers to find moral shadows everywhere, as deep and brooding as the literal ones in Yves Bélanger’s images. No one is clearly good or evil in the world of Juror #2—certainly not its protagonist, Justin (Nicholas Hoult), a former alcoholic whose redemption threatens to be derailed by one potentially fatal mistake, and not even Faith (Toni Collette), the prosecutor whose instinct for justice may well be enough to transcend her political ambitions. Juror #2 suggests the kind of harsh clarity of vision that could only come with age, experience, and perhaps a certain level of bitter acceptance. Kenji Fujishima

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22. Slow (Marija Kavtaradzė)

Across Slow, Marija Kavtaradzė presents Dovydas’s (Kestutis Cicenas) asexuality neither as a crutch nor some sort of mental block that he must overcome. The film steadfastly remains a character-driven piece, homing in on the intricacies of its protagonists’ psychologies and engaging with their subtle emotional shifts as they become more intimate with one another. And it’s through the sheer specificity of these observations that Slow accrues its most penetrating insights into the nature of love, sex, and desire. Elena (Greta Grineviciute) is a free-spirited young woman used to traditional sexual relationships, while Dovydas is new to experiencing an emotional connection strong enough that he’s willing to work to build something beyond mere friendship. And as the characters traverse unexplored terrain and deal with myriad frustrations, Kavtaradzė gives equal credence to Elena and Dovydas’s experiences, from their most bitter disappointments to their most emotionally gratifying highs. Smith

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21. Here (Robert Zemeckis)

Beyond its unlikelihood as a bona fide experimental film funded and distributed by a major studio, Robert Zemeckis’s Here is a remarkably sophisticated and effective work on its own terms. In telling what’s essentially two parallel stories—one about a typical 20th-century American family over a period of decades, one about the history of the physical space they inhabit—from a single fixed camera position, Zemeckis has conjured something far thornier and more powerful than any pithy “Wavelengths meets Forrest Gump” summary may imply. The intricacies of Zemeckis’s approach to montage—borrowed from Richard McGuire’s graphic novel—would take multiple viewings to unpack, just as its heady mix of sentiment, slapstick, and anguish over the quotidian indignities and disappointments of middle-class American life linger in the mind far more than the reactionary homilies of, well, Forrest Gump. Brad Hanford

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20. Pictures of Ghosts (Kleber Mendonça Filho)

At the heart of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s argument in Pictures of Ghosts is how much of the resources and capital that allowed for a thriving cinephilic culture in Recife, Brazil, was stripped away in the 1970s and ’80s, and committed instead to making the city into a tourist destination for wealthy foreigners. One of the first pieces of archival footage we see features Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis on vacation in the city (with little Jamie Lee in tow), a flash of Hollywood glitz that carries uncomfortable associations in context. At one point, Mendonça Filho comments that “fiction films make the best documentaries,” which sounds like a banal truism until the final scene, an unexpected departure from nonfiction that slyly implicates the filmmaker in his own commentary. As always with Mendonça Filho, to reflect reality isn’t enough, as cinema has to find its own truth, even if it takes some imagination to get there. Hanford

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19. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller)

George Miller tends to approach the people he films like objects, fixating on some aspect of them that brings out their larger-than-life humanity, making them effectively mythic. This scalpel-like focus on the iconic possibilities of the individual, something surely shaped by Miller’s years studying and practicing medicine, helps to ground his mammoth flights of fancy, of which Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has enough to fill several battle-ready tanker trucks. Here, it’s as possible to be moved by the very realistic clink of the heroine’s (Anya Taylor-Joy) necklace against a rock as it is by a patently false-looking yet exceedingly painterly time lapse in which a cliffside sapling sprouts outward and upward toward the sky. Though the film’s greatest special effect might very well be Chris Hemsworth as Dementus, who speaks to Miller’s enduring aptitude for utilizing the ridiculous to achieve the sublime. Keith Uhlich

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18. Anora (Sean Baker)

The eponymous character of Anora, a feisty 23-year-old Brooklyn sex worker, lives the sort of hardscrabble and precarious life that writer-director Sean Baker has vigorously tracked across his work. But while Baker’s protagonists are typically mired in the same place, Ani (Mikey Madison), as Anora emphatically prefers to be called, manages to escape the familiar, and crash through the class divide with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Her quixotic quest to remain among Russian oligarchs is a riotously funny neorealist farce that will be familiar to fans of Tangerine and Red Rocket, though at times it feels like the rougher edges of Baker’s vision have been smoothed out in the interest of driving home an easily digestible allegory. Still, Anora is propulsive and entertaining through and through. Even if her character isn’t afforded the depth of Baker’s previous protagonists, that’s no fault of Madison, who whips up a deliriously captivating whirlwind of expletive-laden Brooklyn attitude. Mark Hanson

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17. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof)

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is another one of Mohammed Rasolouf’s clear-eyed accounts of the sacrifices and moral compromises forced on ordinary people by Iran’s oppressive regime. The state’s affinity for capital punishment is again a target of Rasolouf’s ire, but he also has in his sights bourgeois complacency, the tyranny of traditional values, and, above all, the cruel machinations of Iran’s patriarchal culture. Bringing implicit violence and a family’s simmering psychological warfare to the surface, the gradual mental deterioration of its put-upon patriarch sees the film’s final hour not only enter conventional action-thriller terrain but careen right through it, and it ends up somewhere not too far away from Overlook Hotel, in spirit at least. As much as this epic’s sermonizing approach might want for more subtlety, sometimes recalling a PSA, it’s refreshingly balanced and open in its inclusion of differing perspectives. David Robb

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16. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Pham Tien An)

Compared to his numbed reaction to the present, Thien (Le Phong Vu) finds motivation in retracing the past he left behind when he moved to Saigon, and Pham Tien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell patiently observes him rekindling prior relationships in his rural hometown, whether checking in with village elders or running into an ex-girlfriend (Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh), who’s since become a nun. One gradually gets the sense that, though the man left his home to get away from a feeling of being suffocated, he feels far more at ease in the realm of nostalgia than he does in the uncertainty of the present moment. Thien may feel cut off from the world, but Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is deeply in harmony with it, from its masterful sound design that fills in off-screen space with ambient noises, to its observant long takes, to the deference it shows to the wisdom and experience that elders can impart on the young. Jake Cole

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15. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)

There’s no “the” in the title of RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel The Nickel Boys. Though it seems like a minor change, the dropped article turns out to be significant when you see what Ross has brought to the screen. Though Whitehead’s harrowing chronicle of abuses at a reform school in the 1960s was inspired by a real place—the Nickel Academy stands in for the infamous Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida—Ross sees in Whitehead’s story a more universal tale, one with personal and historical implications beyond the characters and settings of this specific narrative. One could call Nickel Boys a coming-of-age tale. But to try to pigeonhole it to a genre would do a disservice to Ross’s remarkable film, which finds an expressive power in formally adventurous technique that fashions mesmerizing, cumulatively affecting poetry out of Whitehead’s prose. Fujishima

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14. Between the Temples (Nathan Silver)

Nathan Silver has a gambler’s faith in his actors and situations that sets him apart from most artists. Throughout Between the Temples, written by Silver and C. Mason Wells, he seems to follow his characters where they need to go, leaving loose ends and longings hanging. Ben (Jason Schwartzman), who’s lost his singing voice in a metaphorical gambit that the film’s screenplay wisely underplays, is coached by Carla (Carol Kane) to push air up from this stomach. Carla touches his stomach as he lies down on a table, and they volley dialogue back and forth in a tennis match of sorts that culminates with him touching her stomach in return. It’s a brief, subtle, unaccountably erotic moment that captures how attraction can spark anywhere, anytime. In a contemporary culture that’s often so relentlessly pushing messages on us, Silver’s willingness to let you feel your way through a scene feels miraculous. Chuck Bowen

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13. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)

“Are we talking about tennis?” asks Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) in a mid-aughts flashback as chugging, four-on-the-floor beats kick in to accompany an argument between him and his sure-to-turn-pro girlfriend, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). It’s one of several instances in Challengers, an intoxicating showcase for the beauty and excitement of bodies in motion, set to a score that feels like a sweaty, thumping, barn-burning event in and of itself, where the characters make subtext into text. “We’re always talking about tennis,” she responds, but in Luca Guadagnino’s film, tennis isn’t just tennis—it’s sex, it’s power, it’s self-determination, or, as Tashi herself puts it at one point, “it’s a relationship.” What do we talk about when we talk about tennis? In Challengers at least, it’s absolutely everything else. Thompson

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12. Janet Planet (Annie Baker)

The plot of Annie Baker’s quiet and moving feature directorial debut, Janet Planet, details the bond between 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) and her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in rural Western Massachusetts in the summer of 1991 just before Lacy enters the sixth grade. The closest that the film comes to dramatic conflict lies in its portrait of the revolving door of love interests and friends that make up its three “acts.” It’s primarily through Lacy’s shifting perspective that we see her mother and those other characters, with each encounter either bringing her closer to Janet or threatening to tear them apart. As has been typical of Baker as a playwright, though, instead of relying on dramatic confrontations or major plot turns, she homes in on small details to illuminate her characters’ lives. All of those subtleties accumulate to build a fascinating portrait not only of a fraught mother-daughter relationship, but of the precocious Lacy herself. Fujishima

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11. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez)

Johan Grimonprez’s documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is primarily focused on the Democratic Republic of Congo and its struggle for independence from Belgium. Together with editor Rik Chaubet, Grimonprez weaves together everything from academic analysis to archival footage, all of which is interlaced with studio sessions and television appearances by Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone, and others, all the while providing pull quotes and interviews in consistently surprising ways. The end result is something like jazz. While generally adhering to a chronology of the Congolese resistance to the game of tug of war between the United States and the Soviet Union, the film more loosely stitches together a variety of media to fashion a stunning screed against colonial racism and state-sanctioned violence that reaches far beyond the years it directly covers. Greg Nussen

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10. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)

Writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man pitilessly plunges into the insecurities gnawing away at Edward (Sebastian Stan), a New York actor struggling to land jobs that don’t center his facial neurofibromatosis. This disfiguring condition pigeonholes him in dementedly cheerful PSA videos about how to accommodate disabled colleagues in the workplace. Schimberg never clarifies if these demoralizing projects create Edward’s low self-worth or merely feed his conception of it, refusing to excavate a psychological silver bullet that can explain the character’s behavior. If anything, the film sides against cultural determinism to help counterbalance hollow narratives about disability. There’s no secret, redemptive nobility to Edward’s suffering. Though cruel, caustic ironies define his life, he slowly morphs into a fearsome figure not because of how he looks but because of how he acts. Marshall Shaffer

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9. Chime (Kurosawa Kiyoshi)

Few would have guessed that Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s first horror film since 2016’s Creepy would come in the form of an NFT. Less surprising is that 45 minutes is all Kurosawa needs to put the genre’s output over the last eight years to shame. Chime concerns a self-absorbed cooking teacher (Yoshioka Mutsuo) who begins hearing the titular noise after a student (Kohinata Seiichi) is driven to madness while complaining of the same. The chime soon emerges as another of Kurosawa’s disease-like avatars of evil spreading inexplicably across society. Despite the project’s ultra-contemporary origins, Kurosawa arrives at his scares the old-fashioned way: a command of on- and off-screen space, light and shadow, and movement within the frame so total as to suggest an unknowable malign presence hovering over the images at all times. You’ll find no dot-connecting backstories or tortured trauma metaphors here, only a master filmmaker plunging you into incomprehensible terror, one brilliant formal choice at a time. Hanford

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8. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is the rare movie that deserves being called Lynchian—not for any overt weirdness, but for its mastery of ineffable, almost subliminal unease to depict repression and the toll it takes on one’s psyche. Expanding on We’re All Going to the World’s Fair‘s subtle illumination of gender dysphoria, Schoenbrun at first delicately illustrates the way that pop culture can be a catalyst for self-discovery among loners and misfits, only to slowly dig deeper and reveal the limits of displacing one’s questions of identity onto an object of obsession. Unable or unwilling to confront the questions that his fixation prompts, Owen (Justice Smith, always standing agonizingly on the verge of physical and emotional implosion) lets life slowly pass by as the world starts to seem increasingly alien and increasingly inescapable. I Saw the TV Glow regularly blurs the line between reality and fantasy, but it’s in the starkest and most reflective moments that the film feels the most like cosmic, mind-shattering horror. Cole

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7. Evil Does Not Exist (Hamaguchi Ryûsuke)

Evil Does Not Exist’s chief setting is Mizubiki Village, a small and isolated countryside community that’s far enough from Tokyo to offer a relief from the clutter and freneticism of city life but close enough to be easily reachable by city folk. Precisely because it’s so beautiful, the community is destined to be gobbled up by developers as a vacation paradise for the wealthy, and Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s elliptical narrative charts the beginning of this invasion. Had the townsfolk been pitted against the glamping developers, or Takumi (Omika Hitoshi) and Takahashi (Kosaka Ryuji), one of the representatives hired to sell the glamping project to the locals, been allowed to bond and teach one another life lessons, Hamaguchi might have let us off the political hook, comforting us with fantasy. Curtailing his narratives, seizing up his action, which he foreshadows with the clipped-off score and strange tracking shots, Hamaguchi forces us to reckon with the industrialization of nature—and stew in it. Bowen

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6. Last Summer (Catherine Breillat)

In Last Summer, Catherine Breillat brings her icy, unwaveringly sober sensibilities to one of the most common of American pop cultural sex fantasies: a teenager’s tryst with a MILF. At their home in the suburbs of Paris, we see Anne (Léa Drucker) with her older husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), who’s successful but scans as dull and schlubby when compared to his trim and attractive wife. If we know Last Summer’s narrative ahead of time, we may feel as if an equation is being established that’s typical of older-woman, younger-man sex fantasies: that a boring husband gives a wife license to get her groove back elsewhere. But we’d be wrong. Elsewhere, Breillat doesn’t mar the relationship between Ann and Théo (Samuel Kircher), Pierre’s 17-year-old son, in the harlequin clichés a daydream. The reality of this situation is always compacted by Breillat’s committed and very pointed objectivity. No one in Last Summer is sentimentalized, and Breillat denies neither the ickiness of this affair nor its potential pull. Bowen

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5. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

Even though it also concerns an architect fighting entrenched elites to achieve his singular vision, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist doesn’t bow before the altar of The Fountainhead. Yet he takes a gauntlet thrown down early in King Vidor’s 1949 film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel—no place originally exists in architecture, and the past cannot be improved upon—more seriously than either artist. Corbet’s epic, like Adrien Brody’s László Toth, remains unconcerned with choosing between honoring the past and catering to the present. They instead seek to transcend time altogether, thus equipping their artistry to endure well into the future. László is an imperfect but never inconsistent protagonist, which is part of why his jagged edges mesh so well with the airtight construction of the film. Corbet builds on celluloid what László does with concrete: an unvarnished monument to the authentic American character. Shaffer

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4. Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice)

After three decades and a smattering of shorts, Close Your Eyes marks Victor Erice’s return to—and reckoning with—feature filmmaking. Its opening scene, set in an ivy-ensnared chateau in rural 1940s France, seems of a piece with the rest of his work: softly lit, prudently edited, and shot on velvety celluloid. Then, suddenly, it ends. This isn’t Close Your Eyes. Rather, it’s an excerpt from The Farewell Gaze, a film-within-a-film that was left unfinished in the early ’90s following the unexplained disappearance of lead actor Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado). In a stark, digitally shot 2012, the film’s aging director, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), agrees to take part in a television special about Julio, thrusting himself back into a mystery he’s spent 20 years trying to forget. On its most basic level, Close Your Eyes functions as a stirring detective story. But its true interests lie not in unspooling Julio’s past so much as in reckoning with the ways those connected to him have also, in their own manner, begun fading away. Kronman

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3. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)

Even at its funniest, Hard Truths finds Marianne Jean-Baptiste channeling an anger that feels excruciatingly real. There’s some larger-than-life acting here—in a particularly devastating scene, her Pansy chokes out a single “thank you” with such difficulty that she may as well be passing a kidney stone—though the actress finds equal discomfort in the charged silences between, which have mutated into something outright terrifying by film’s end. Throughout, Mike Leigh steadily develops characters in one-off, meandering vignettes before putting them in rooms together to examine how their preoccupations mesh. One of the titular hard truths may well be that even the bitterest among us are deserving of sympathy, though the murkier corollary to this is that, put bluntly, sympathy is hard-won. Leigh and his performers are content to let this contradiction sit, because to do otherwise would be dishonest. Cole Kronman

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2. The Beast (Bertrand Bonello)

We’re all products of our time and circumstance, but how frequently do we push back against the forces—on the beasts both real and imagined—that keep us in anonymizing check? And, having taken such risks, how often do our own stories still end in tragedy? But then again, is the endpoint, our endpoint, the true crux of the matter? A line from Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, the loose inspiration for the disquieting The Beast, illuminates what is likely writer-director Bertrand Bonello’s main goal: “It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonored, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.” What the film most acutely captures, as its sprawling canvas expands and contracts before us, is the ceaseless cycle of two people failing to be over several lifetimes, in certain instances because of circumstances beyond their control, and in others because of their own purposeful inertia. Uhlich

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1. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)

The title of Radu Jude’s film cheekily alludes to the apathy that grips many of us these days. We trudge on bored, tired, and underpaid while stories of corporate and political overreach hammer us into a numbed complacency, modulated by social media that implicitly promises that we can be stars too. The hero of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a production assistant tasked with recruiting victims of corporate negligence to spin their stories into anodyne PR anecdotes. We follow her as she navigates Bucharest, arguing with a corporation that’s robbing graves for an apartment complex, talking about matters of artistic conformity with director Uwe Boll, and channeling her rage via a racist, sexist online alter ego modeled after Andrew Tate. As Angela drifts between the realms of the working class and the corporate sharks hiding behind sleek images and banalities, Jude meshes “real” and online worlds with an ease that truly suggests how cinema and social media can comingle. This film is epic in form, loose-limbed and alive in the moment, yet capable of being digested in chunks by TikTokers who might discern the sadness and poetry behind the meme. Bowen

Our Runners-Up

Smile 2 (Parker Finn), Aggro Dr1ft (Harmony Korine), Red Rooms (Pascal Plante), Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik), All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia), Universal Language (Matthew Rankin), Ghostlight (Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan), The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar), The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams), How to Have Sex (Molly Manning Walker), Eureka (Lisandro Alonso), Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (Tyler Taormina), Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola), Dahomey (Mati Diop), Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader), The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez), Civil War (Alex Garland), Good One (India Donaldson), In Our Day (Hong Sang-soo), The Substance (Coralie Fargeat), I’m Still Here (Walter Salles), Perfect Days (Wim Wenders), Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve), No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, and Hamdan Ballal), Kidnapped (Marco Bellocchio)

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Individual Ballots


Chris Barsanti

1. Anora
2. The Brutalist
3. A Real Pain
4. Challengers
5. Civil War
6. Io Capitano
7. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
8. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
9. Strange Darling
10. Conclave

Honorable Mention: The Apprentice, Between the Temples, Dune: Part Two, Flow, Heretic, How to Have Sex, Rebel Ridge, Saturday Night, Sing Sing, Universal Language

Chuck Bowen

1. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
2. Hard Truths
3. Between the Temples
4. Last Summer
5. Juror #2
6. Chime
7. Evil Does Not Exist
8. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
9. In Our Day
10. Smile 2

Honorable Mention: The Beast, The Devil’s Bath, A Different Man, Gasoline Rainbow, Ghostlight, Hit Man, I Saw the TV Glow, Oh, Canada, Pictures of Ghosts, Red Rooms

Justin Clark

1. Anora
2. The Brutalist
3. Hundreds of Beavers
4. Dune: Part Two
5. Challengers
6. The Wild Robot
7. The Substance
8. I Saw The TV Glow
9. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
10. Queer

Honorable Mention: Babygirl, Blink Twice, Civil War, Drive-Away Dolls, Kinds of Kindness, Love Lies Bleeding, The People’s Joker, A Quiet Place: Day One, She Is Conann, Strange Darling

Jake Cole

1. The Beast
2. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
3. I Saw the TV Glow
4. Close Your Eyes
5. Janet Planet
6. The Brutalist
7. Evil Does Not Exist
8. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
9. Hundreds of Beavers
10. The Colors Within

Honorable Mention: Challengers, Dahomey, Dune: Part Two, Hard Truths, Last Summer, My First Film, Nickel Boys, No Other Land, Rap World, The Settlers

Clayton Dillard

1. Here [Robert Zemeckis]
2. Aggro Dr1ft
3. Hard Truths
4. Oh, Canada
5. Close Your Eyes
6. How to Have Sex
7. Chime
8. Civil War
9. Smile 2
10. Last Summer

Honorable Mention: All We Imagine as Light, The Beast, Challengers, Coma, The Deliverance, Flow, Juror #2, Megalopolis, Pictures of Ghosts, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Kenji Fujishima

1. Hard Truths
2. Last Summer
3. Kidnapped
4. Dahomey
5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
6. Nickel Boys
7. I Saw the TV Glow
8. Flow
9. The Room Next Door
10. Juror #2

Honorable Mention: Anora, The Beast, Between the Temples, Evil Does Not Exist, Janet Planet, Mambar Pierrette, Megalopolis, Red Rooms, The Settlers, Union

Ed Gonzalez

1. Last Summer
2. Pictures of Ghosts
3. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
4. The Brutalist
5. Evil Does Not Exist
6. Slow
7. Chime
8. Dahomey
9. I Saw the TV Glow
10. Close Your Eyes

Honorable Mention: Between the Temples, The Devil’s Bath, Dìdi, A Different Man, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Limbo, No Other Land, Red Rooms, The Settlers, Smile 2

Wes Greene

1. Between the Temples
2. The Beast
3. A Different Man
4. Close Your Eyes
5. Good One
6. I Saw the TV Glow
7. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
8. The Substance
9. Ghostlight
10. The Settlers

Honorable Mention: Challengers, Chime, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Hard Truths, Here [Robert Zemeckis], His Three Daughters, Last Summer, Pictures of Ghosts, Sasquatch Sunset, Universal Language

Brad Hanford

1. Close Your Eyes
2. Evil Does Not Exist
3. Chime
4. The Beast
5. Juror #2
6. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
7. Last Summer
8. Here [Robert Zemeckis]
9. Eureka
10. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Honorable Mention: Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, Coma, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Hit Man, In Our Day, Megalopolis, Oh, Canada, Red Rooms, Trap, A Traveler’s Needs

Mark Hanson

1. Concrete Valley
2. Eureka
3. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
4. The Human Surge 3
5. Close Your Eyes
6. Last Summer
7. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
8. Universal Language
9. Failed State
10. The Brutalist

Honorable Mention: Aggro Dr1ft, All We Imagine as Light, Chime, A Different Man, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Evil Does Not Exist, Gasoline Rainbow, Janet Planet, New Strains, Oddity, This Closeness

Rob Humanick

1. Robot Dreams
2. Perfect Days
3. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
4. Evil Does Not Exist
5. The Brutalist
6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
7. Close Your Eyes
8. Hard Truths
9. A Real Pain
10. Chime

Honorable Mention: The Beast, Blitz, Dune: Part Two, Ghostlight, Girls Will Be Girls, Hundreds of Beavers, In a Violent Nature, Memoir of a Snail, Pictures of Ghosts, Rebel Ridge

Seth Katz

1. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
2. Hard Truths
3. Kidnapped
4. Janet Planet
5. A Real Pain
6. June Zero
7. Hit Man
8. Good One
9. Red Rooms
10. The Brutalist

Honorable Mention: All We Imagine as Light, The Beast, Between the Temples, Close Your Eyes, La Cocina, Coup de Chance, Drive-Away Dolls, Hundreds of Beavers, Nickel Boys, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Cole Kronman

1. The Beast
2. Hard Truths
3. Evil Does Not Exist
4. Close Your Eyes
5. Janet Planet
6. I Saw the TV Glow
7. Last Summer
8. Chime
9. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
10. The Brutalist

Honorable Mention: All We Imagine as Light, A Different Man, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Juror #2, Look Back, Megalopolis, Rap World, The Room Next Door, Stress Positions, A Traveler’s Needs

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Zach Lewis

1. Close Your Eyes
2. Aggro Dr1ft
3. Megalopolis
4. The Beast
5. Hit Man
6. Red Rooms
7. The Human Surge 3
8. Bramayugam
9. Here [Robert Zemeckis]
10. Exhuma

Honorable Mention: Anora, Between the Temples, The Brutalist, Janet Planet, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, In a Violent Nature, Music, Rebel Ridge, Rumours, Smile 2, Trap

Charles Lyons-Burt

1. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
2. The Beast
3. How to Have Sex
4. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
5. Megalopolis
6. Bramayugam
7. The Shadowless Tower
8. Nickel Boys
9. Pictures of Ghosts
10. Smile 2

Honorable Mention: All We Imagine as Light, Babygirl, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Close Your Eyes, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Good One, Last Summer, Longlegs, Love Lies Bleeding, Slow

Ross McIndoe

1. Perfect Days
2. Femme
3. A Real Pain
4. Challengers
5. Exhibiting Forgiveness
6. The Outrun
7. Anora
8. Nickel Boys
9. Civil War
10. We Live In Time

Honorable Mention: Conclave, The Fire Inside, Girls Will Be Girls, Hit Man, Love Lies Bleeding, Oh, Canada, Rebel Ridge, Sing Sing, Sleep, Trap

Greg Nussen

1. I Saw the TV Glow
2. Hard Truths
3. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
4. No Other Land
5. Chime
6. The Room Next Door
7. All We Imagine as Light
8. Trap
9. How to Have Sex
10. Good One

Honorable Mention: Aggro Dr1ft, Anora, The Brutalist, Dahomey, Dune: Part Two, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Green Border, In a Violent Nature, Juror #2, Queendom

William Repass

1. Eureka
2. Kinds of Kindness
3. Settlers
4. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
5. The Beast
6. Anora
7. Rumours
8. Club Zero
9. A Different Man

Honorable Mention: The Brutalist, Challengers, Close Your Eyes, Drive-Away Dolls, Evil Does Not Exist, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, How to Have Sex, I Saw the TV Glow, Skin Deep, The Substance, Sweet Dreams

David Robb

1. Close Your Eyes
2. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
3. This Closeness
4. The Human Surge 3
5. A Different Man
6. Universal Language
7. Janet Planet
8. How To Have Sex
9. Drive-Away Dolls
10. Rap World

Honorable Mentions: Anora, Coma, Dune: Part Two, Hit Man, I Saw the TV Glow, Love Lies Bleeding, The Room Next Door, The Settlers, Strange Darling, The Substance

Steven Scaife

1. I Saw the TV Glow
2. Janet Planet
3. A Different Man
4. Red Rooms
5. Hard Truths
6. Stress Positions
7. Love Lies Bleeding
8. Hundreds of Beavers
9. Nickel Boys
10. The Substance

Honorable Mention: Blackout, Challengers, Chime, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, Cuckoo, Flow, Last Summer, Mars Express, The People’s Joker, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

Diego Semerene

1. I’m Still Here
2. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
3. How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies
4. Slow
5. Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell
6. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
7. Universal Language
8. Queendom
9. Terrestrial Verses
10. Santosh

Honorable Mention: All We Imagine as Light, Babygirl, Daughters, The Devil’s Bath, The Girl with the Needle, Green Border, Kidnapped, Last Summer, No Other Land, The Room Next Door

Marshall Shaffer

1. Hit Man
2. Challengers
3. Ghostlight
4. A Different Man
5. The Brutalist
6. A Real Pain
7. His Three Daughters
8. Babygirl
9. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
10. Nickel Boys

Honorable Mention: Anora, Between the Temples, Daughters, Dune: Part Two, Hard Truths, Janet Planet, Juror #2, Last Summer, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Universal Language

Derek Smith

1. The Brutalist
2. Nickel Boys
3. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
4. Hard Truths
5. The Beast
6. All We Imagine as Light
7. Close Your Eyes
8. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
9. Hundreds of Beavers
10. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Honorable Mention: Anora, A Different Man, Evil Does Not Exist, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Gasoline Rainbow, I Saw the TV Glow, Janet Planet, The Room Next Door, Slow, Universal Language

Ryan Swen

1. The Beast
2. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
3. Evil Does Not Exist
4. Music
5. The Human Surge 3
6. Youth (Homecoming)
7. Youth (Hard Times)
8. In Our Day
9. Last Summer
10. It’s Not Me

Honorable Mention: Anora, Close Your Eyes, Coma, Eureka, Hard Truths, Here [Bas Devos], Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Nickel Boys, The Shadowless Tower, A Traveler’s Needs

Rocco Thompson

1. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
2. Challengers
3. The Room Next Door
4. Kinds of Kindness
5. Smile 2
6. Janet Planet
7. The Beast
8. Last Summer
9. Hard Truths
10. Rumours

Honorable Mention: Anora, Babygirl, The Brutalist, Dahomey, Dune: Part Two, Femme, How to Have Sex, Queer, Red Rooms, Robot Dreams

Kyle Turner

1. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
2. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
3. Tuesday
4. The Wild Robot
5. No Other Land
6. Crossing
7. I Saw the TV Glow
8. Stress Positions
9. Hollywoodgate
10. Last Summer

Honorable Mention: Art College 1994, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, The First Omen, The Girl with the Needle, How to Have Sex, Lyd, Nocturnes, Omen, Problemista, She Is Conann

Keith Uhlich

1. Evil Does Not Exist
2. The Beast
3. In a Violent Nature
4. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
5. Last Summer
6. Hard Truths
7. Janet Planet
8. The Brutalist
9. Here [Robert Zemeckis]
10. The Room Next Door

Honorable Mention: Chime, Close Your Eyes, A Different Man, The End, Eureka, I Saw the TV Glow, It’s Not Me, Kidnapped, Nosferatu, Smile 2

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