Screen’s critics have selected their top films of 2024, plus the best documentaries and standout performances.
Fionnuala Halligan
Screen’s executive editor, reviews and new talent
Top five
1. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
Ross carries his characters close to his soul. His film is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name about a Jim Crow-era penitentiary for young Black boys, itself based on the truth of Florida’s Dozier school. Here he stands testament to the pain and the tragedy of lives cut short by racism and brutality by becoming, literally, their eyes and ears. An extraordinarily empathetic and vivid film, and a restoration of dignity to those who suffered, and continue to suffer.
2: Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)
3: All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia)
4: Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)
5: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)
Tim Grierson
Screen’s senior US critic, based in Los Angeles, has written for the publication since 2005
Top five
1. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
Ross’s poetic 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening suggested the makings of an auteur. His feature narrative debut, based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winner, more than confirms that promise. Utilising first-person PoV to take us inside the perspective of two Black teenagers trapped at an abusive reform school in the 1960s, Nickel Boys shatters storytelling conventions while finding new ways to depict the everyday racism that threatens to destroy so many young lives before they can begin.
2. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
3. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
4. The Seed Of The Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof)
5. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)
Allan Hunter
Based in Edinburgh, Hunter has reviewed films for Screen since 1990
Top five
1. All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia)
Kapadia’s beguiling city symphony drifts though Mumbai like an angel from Wings Of Desire. Drenched in monsoon rains, her film captures the everyday bustle and challenge of the city alongside personal tales of loneliness and longing that unfold among the anonymity of multitudes. A trio of generation-spanning women seek ways to be true to themselves and pursue independent lives in this deeply romantic celebration of friendship, sisterhood and the way that confronting the past can open the path to the future.
2. Vermiglio (Maura Delpero)
3. The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodovar)
4. Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)
5. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)
Wendy Ide
Ide joined Screen in 2015 as a UK-based critic, and is also the chief film critic for The Observer
Top five
1. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
Ross’s fiction debut captures the soul of Colson Whitehead’s novel about the friendship between two Black boys in a 1960s Florida reform school. But it also brings something new to the table — a way of looking that subtly rewrites the language of cinema and shifts our means of engaging with performances. It’s a remarkable achievement: a film that manages to be formally groundbreaking without losing its emotional heft.
2. All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia)
3. Anora (Sean Baker)
4. Vermiglio (Maura Delpero)
5. Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)
Jonathan Romney
A longtime contributor to Screen, Romney also writes for Film Comment, Sight & Sound and The Observer, and teaches at the UK’s National Film and Television School
Top five
1. Sasquatch Sunset (David Zellner and Nathan Zellner)
The Zellner brothers don’t yet seem to have become cult heroes, but their latest is their boldest, strangest, most lyrical yet. Four hairy ‘bigfoot’ creatures explore rural America, and with it all the things that come with being human (or sort of human): life, death, sex, curiosity, copious bodily fluids. Surely the most poetic gross-out comedy yet devised, this is also a feat of wordless but intensely expressive acting for the four performers, including Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough.
2. Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass (Quay brothers)
3. Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes)
4. Anora (Sean Baker)
5. Black Dog (Guan Hu)
Click here for more of Jonathan’s top films of 2024, best documentaries, and performance of the year
Nikki Baughan
Screen’s deputy reviews editor
Top five
1. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass)
Glass takes a big swing after her 2019 debut Saint Maud, and knocks it out of the park with this queer romance set in the wrestling world of 1980s New Mexico. With blistering performances from leads Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian, the film is a blend of ’80s small town Americana, underdog sporting drama and feminist revenge narrative, flavoured with subtle hints of genre that build slowly to one of the year’s most cathartic climaxes.
2. His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs)
3. All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia)
4. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
5. The Balconettes (Noémie Merlant)
Lee Marshall
Marshall joined Screen in 1996 as an Italy-based film critic. He also writes on travel, design and culture for a range of UK, US and Italian publications
Top five
1. Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat (Johan Grimonprez)
The veteran Belgian cineaste and provocateur delivers a rich, shape-shifting documentary that manages to be both fiercely intelligent and rousingly indignant. Patrice Lumumba, Khrushchev at the UN, Malcolm X and bebop jazz combine in a formally dazzling rereading of a dark chapter in Europe’s postcolonial history that is as cool, articulate and devastating as a Thelonious Monk solo.
2. All We Imagine As Light (Payal Kapadia)
3. Anora (Sean Baker)
4. April (Dea Kulumbegashvili)
5. A Want In Her (Myrid Carten)
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