Favourite Films of 2024

These are the ten films given a full release in Australia in 2024, and therefore accessible to most audiences, which left the most lasting impression on me.

Win Wenders’s best narrative film in decades, it contains so many of his most effective trademarks: an amazing soundtrack, a reverence for the films of Yasujirô Ozu, and the joy and beauty to be found in everyday moments and observations. Rarely has a life of routine and contentment felt so appealing.

One of my favourite Kore-eda films, this uses the idea of how the absence of small bits of information can completely change our understanding of events. Most effective is how issues concerning the way careless actions of adults affect children, are explore with tenderness and insight.

I knew I was going to love a film by Andrew Haigh starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal anyway, but this surpassed expectations. I adore romance films layered with melancholy, and anything to do with parenthood, so this floored me. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are also incredible.

Adopts the aesthetics of war documentary footage to scrutinise the uneasy relationship journalists have to the atrocities they are recording and supposedly keeping an emotional and physical distance from. As with his previous films Alex Garland creates an atmosphere of bleak despair while still maintaining the humanity of the characters and delivers moments of spectacle that are enthralling and gut-churning.

As he so often does, Sean Baker situates a narrative in the world of sex work without any romanticisation, moralising or sensationalism. Along with Kelly Reichardt he is one of the best living filmmakers when it comes to giving agency and depth to marginalised or ignored groups of people. Best of all is how Baker has the confidence and assuredness to never resort to obvious or easy plot points.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had such a visceral response to a film. It wears its cinematic influences in such a direct way, as both homage and critique, while still feeling like an audaciously singular vision to fuel a stylised, ultra darkly funny, body horror satire about self-loathing and misogyny.

This is possibly the best film I’ve seen about the current European refugee crisis, capturing the hypocrisy and cruelty inflicted on people when petty politics, racism and bureaucracy dictates asylum policy, and the results are kept out of sight. The way Agnieszka Holland uses multiple perspectives to express the various ways humanity and inhumanity wrestle for dominance is artful and suitably complex.

It’s been a long time since I’ve left a film so unsure about what exactly happened and what precise meaning I should draw from it, but I was overcome with a sensation of being extremely moved. Describing films as Lynchian is a cliche now and usually highly inaccurate, but this is one very rare case where the use of dream logic and the themes of identity and memory make for an apt comparison

The science fiction trope of robots learning from then inspiring humanity has been put to great use in family animations such as The Iron Giant, Wall-E, Big Hero 6 and now The Wild Robot; a visually and thematically beautiful film about building families and communities through kindness and non-conformity.

Expressing the horrors of the Holocaust by keeping those horrors in the background and offscreen, to instead observe the everyday life of an Auschwitz commandant’s family as if filmed for reality television, is a bold experiment in dread, and it works.

This list was compiled for the upcoming Senses of Cinema 2024 World Poll

Honourable mentions

Twenty more films I loved this year, listed alphabetically:

My Letterboxd account contains a full list of all the films I’ve seen that were released in Australia in 2024.

Special mentions

Finally, I also enjoyed a number of films this year that only played at festivals and to the best of my knowledge don’t currently have a 2025 release date. These are five highlights:

Thomas Caldwell, 2024