The 10 Best Films of 2024 You Probably Missed

The 2024 film landscape was rich beyond what most audiences had time to discover. While blockbusters dominated the conversation, independent and international cinema produced work that will be discussed for years.

The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer Holocaust film told entirely from the perspective of the commandant family living next to Auschwitz, is formally radical. The atrocity is never shown, only heard: screams, gunshots, and furnace roar bleed through domestic tranquility.

The method matters. Glazer had the house wired with around ten cameras running at once and no crew in the rooms, so the cast played domestic scenes not knowing which lens was on them. The sound was built separately over roughly a year by Johnnie Burn from testimony and archival research. It won Oscars for sound and international feature, and the sound is the film.

Past Lives, Celine Song debut about two childhood friends from Seoul who reconnect in New York, explores the Korean concept of inyeon. Greta Lee performance is revelatory.

All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh fantastical drama about a lonely screenwriter who visits his deceased parents, delivers performances of extraordinary tenderness from Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal.

Haigh shot the parents' scenes for All of Us Strangers in the Croydon house he grew up in, with Claire Foy and Jamie Bell playing his parents in the rooms he was a child in. Those sequences have a specificity nothing else matches. It is adapted from a 1987 Japanese novel by Taichi Yamada and ends on Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet Palme d Or winner, builds a courtroom drama around an ambiguous death. Sandra Huller performance as the accused wife is one of the decade best.

Sandra Huller was in Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest in the same stretch: a woman defending herself in a French courtroom, and a woman gardening beside a death camp. Watch both in a week: the strangest double bill any actor has offered. The dog in Anatomy of a Fall, Messi, won the Palm Dog at Cannes.

Four more worth chasing. Perfect Days, the Wim Wenders film about a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo, which won Koji Yakusho the acting prize at Cannes. La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher on English tomb raiders in eighties Tuscany, shot on mixed film gauges so the image texture keeps shifting. Evil Does Not Exist, which Ryusuke Hamaguchi built from a commission for visuals to accompany live music by Eiko Ishibashi. And Nickel Boys, shot almost entirely from behind its protagonists' eyes.

For a comprehensive list with streaming availability, https://letterboxd.com provides user ratings and watchlists that help you track down even the most limited releases.

Finding them is easy now. MUBI runs about twelve pounds a month in the UK and its GO scheme hands subscribers a free cinema ticket each week for a selected release, which is how these get seen on a screen rather than a laptop. BFI Player is under a fiver a month with the deeper back catalogue. Curzon Home Cinema rents new independent releases at around ten pounds, often the week they open.

Seeking out smaller films is the single best thing you can do for your cultural diet. These titles offer more emotional range, visual ambition, and intellectual stimulation than any franchise installment. Pick one tonight.