10 Best Films 2024: Joseph Wade
As we prepare to enter yet another year in which nothing feels certain and everything appears to be up for debate, us cinephiles can rest assured of one everlasting thing: cinema is not dead.
Feature films from across the globe have inspired and motivated us in 2024, while Hollywood’s flagship productions and some of the great cinema of China and India has wowed and astonished with big budget choreography, never-before-seen stunt work, and a whole heap of fun.
In the short film realm, a host of up-and-coming filmmakers have strutted their stuff, embracing subversive filmmaking techniques, challenging topics, and focused storytelling methods, to announce themselves onto the world’s stage as a to-be-anticipated new generation of directors, cinematographers, writers, editors, and so on.
In the following list are the ten very best feature films put to screen. These films have embraced the culture of our day, have stretched boundaries in the contemporary filmmaking space, and have made the most of their unique positions of being able to offer the future a brief insight into the lives, thoughts and feelings of those of us occupying Earth in 2024.
These are the 10 Best Films of 2024, as selected by me, Joseph Wade.
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10. The Substance
Audacious, visceral, and monumentally out there, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance was like a rollercoaster of anxiety and phobias; the type of cinema you watch mesmerised while you stuff popcorn into your mouth.
Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle is a television celebrity reaching middle age and therefore the end of her run in the limelight. In order to save her career, she undergoes an experimental kind of surgery in which a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) is birthed from her back. The two must alternate consciousness week-to-week, but as the addiction to youth and beauty grows, so does the younger version’s desire to remain in control. It is a pointed commentary on Hollywood’s horrifying beauty standards and our collective ogling at those who fall victim to its demands.
There are few things that can prepare you for a monstrous amalgamation of two bodies quite literally coughing up a breast, and the impact it will hold to anyone with self-image or self-esteem issues is likely to be that of the shock and awe times ten, but the pointed examination of our culture’s ageist philosophies and frankly ridiculous beauty standards is worthy of any Best of Year film. With two exceptional leading turns, and a supporting performance from Dennis Quaid that is worth its scene-chewing weight in gold, there’s not a second of The Substance you’ll want to miss.
9. Civil War
It would be cliché to describe Alex Garland’s near future war thriller as a “movie for our times”, but its relevance to contemporary politics and the fear of rising division certainly made it more of a visceral cinema experience than may have been the case in another year or era. This one is all loud noises to force your eyes open, and hopeless story strands to encourage you to enact change.
Cailee Spaeny’s middle film of a trio of hot streak performances in Priscilla, this, and then Alien: Romulus, sees her want-to-be war photographer Jessie taken under the wing of seasoned professional Lee Smith, as Smith and fellow reporters Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) attempt to traverse the not-so-United States to get an interview with the tyrannical president (Nick Offerman). It’s a tense watch filled with stand-offs, ideological grey areas, and some of the best dialogue scenes (and performances) of the year.
The standout moment in Civil War comes when the already traumatised central group encounter Jesse Plemons’ Militiaman (actual character name) and a several-minutes-long scene of white hot tension unfolds. Whose side he is on is anyone’s guess, but he has a clear taste for blood and isn’t going to let our group of protagonists get away easily. The dialogue is phenomenal, as are the performances by Dunst, Moura, and especially Plemons; and it comes at just the right time to spark new interest in the story, to ensure we are at attention for some of the best looking cinema of the year, and arguably the best-filmed act in writer-director Alex Garland’s already impressive career.
Absent of a political stance clear enough for some, this for-the-times war movie about ideological differences, and the very real threats these pose to our contemporary landscape, is an unmissable war movie for the post-War-on-Terror age.
