‘Close Your Eyes’ tops our film critics’ list of the best movies of 2024: NPR

It is often said that December for film critics is like tax season for accountants. This is our crunch time as we try to take stock of the films of the past 12 months and decide our favourites, individually and collectively.

Earlier this month, the New York Film Critics Circle gave its best picture award to The BrutalistBrady Corbet’s sweeping drama about a Hungarian-born architect’s postwar American rebirth. A few days later, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, of which I am a member, presented its top award AnoraSean Baker’s wildly entertaining farce about a sex worker in Brooklyn.

That says something about the quality of the movies this year, as much as I like them Anora and The Brutalistboth titles landed just outside my own personal list of favorites. Here are the 10 – no. 11 – best film in 2024.

Close your eyes

It is more than 50 years since the legendary Víctor Erice made one of the greatest of all Spanish films, Spirit of the Hive (1973). Since then, he has directed only three features, the latest of which comes after an absence of around three decades from the director’s chair.

Both elegiac and quietly delighted, Close your eyes begins as a kind of cinephile detective story, with a streak of meta: the main character (played by Manolo Solo) is himself a long-retired filmmaker trying to solve the mystery of an old friend and former actor who disappeared years earlier. By its transcendent final scenes, this absorbing drama movingly affirms the power of love, the inevitability of loss and the comforting pleasures of getting lost in the movies.

Don’t expect too much from the end of the world and Evil does not exist

IN Don’t expect too much from the end of the worlda refreshingly dark comedy from Romanian director Radu Jude, the stunning Ilinca Manolache plays a production assistant who works inhumane hours on a corporate video promoting — wait for it — workplace safety. IN Evil does not exista quietly haunting drama from Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (drive my car), a proposed glamping site threatens the environmental peace of a forested Japanese town. The consequences of unchecked corporate greed are in full, dire view; so are the killer instincts of two of the best, most wildly original filmmakers working today.

Nickel boys and A different man

They are two of the year’s most daringly inventive American films, both of which brilliantly upend our usual notions of empathy and identification. In his groundbreaking 2019 adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel, Nickel boysscreenwriter and director RaMell Ross uses a first-person camera that puts us inside the heads of his protagonists, two black boys enduring juvenile detention in Jim Crow-era Florida. In Aaron Schimberg’s spinningly original and provocative A different manSebastian Stan plays a “facially unique” New Yorker who gets a miraculous chance to inhabit someone else’s skin – only to find he still can’t escape his own.

La Chimera and Music

Two enchanting, achingly romantic dramas put a reviving spin on the ancient myth. Josh O’Connor plays an eerily charismatic modern-day Orpheus in Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimeraa tale of lost graves and grave robbers that might as well have been given the title Seize the Tuscan sun. Meanwhile with Music, the German director Angela Schanelec weaves an enigmatic puzzle rooted in the story of Oedipus Rex – a tragedy that, in this sui generis tale, loses almost all of its narrative footing, but none of its crushing power.

No other country and Green border

Two searing films – one non-fiction, one fiction – look unflinchingly into horror. Still without a US distributor, despite winning several festival and critics awards in 2024, the documentary No other country is the work of four filmmakers – two Palestinians, two Israelis – who bravely documented the Israeli government’s demolition of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank. The intensely moving drama Green borderfrom Polish director Agnieszka Holland, embroils us in the chaos of the Polish-Belarusian border, where refugees, soldiers and human rights activists find themselves in an agonizing geopolitical limbo.

Everything we imagine as light and Hard truths

Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia won the Grand Prix at Cannes for Everything we imagine as lighta quietly sparkling drama about three Mumbai women, all chafing in their own ways against gendered expectations. No less attuned to the bonds that bind women, and equally rigorous in his pursuit of realism, veteran English filmmaker Mike Leigh gave us a toe-to-toe drama with Hard truthswith Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin (both alumni of his triumph in 1996, Secrets and lies) in two of the year’s finest performances.