AP Critics Pick the Top Movies of 2024

Theaters are humming right now, with Wicked and Moana 2 bringing moviegoers in droves, but it's been a fairly bruising movie year. In between blockbusters, the challenge of simply getting to the screen feels more perilous than ever. The year was marked by filmmakers who wagered everything from a $120 million pile (Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis) to their life (dissident Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig). Considering the paths of The Apprentice (about Donald Trump's rise in New York) or the Israeli occupation documentary No Other Land (which still lacks a distributor), the question of what gets released was a common refrain. Here are AP film writers Jake Coyle and Lindsey Bahr's picks for the best movies of 2024:

Coyle:

1. All We Imagine As Light: This year did produce some stone-cold masterpieces, none more so than Payal Kapadia's sublime tale of three women in modern Mumbai.
2. Nickel Boys: RaMell Ross' adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, about two Black teenagers at an abusive reform school in the Jim Crow South, is shot mostly from the two boys' first-person perspective.
3. Anora: It contains many of the reasons to go to the movies—to laugh at a clattering comic set piece, to witness a young performer's breakthrough, to be devastated.
4. I Saw the TV Glow: Jane Schoenbrun's sophomore feature is a chilling 1990s coming of age in which a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like series offers a possible portal out of drab suburban life.
5. Green Border: The fury of Agnieszka Holland's searing migrant drama is not an easy movie to watch, nor should it be.

Bahr

1. Blitz: Steve McQueen tells a different kind of World War II story in a powerful and clear-eyed odyssey through London during the German bombing raid.
2. All We Imagine as Light: Poetic and transportive, Kapadia's Mumbai-set film explores the vibrations of a thrilling but brutally impersonal metropolis.
3. Thelma: Josh Margolin's debut feature about a 90-something (June Squibb) on a mission to get $10,000 back from a scammer is so modest in scope and effortlessly enjoyable that it's easy to undervalue.
4. Anora: It takes a special kind of movie to transcend the echo chamber of arthouse cinephelia and become a cultural moment, but Anora did it. A classic in waiting.
5. Nickel Boys: Ross transforms Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel about the abuses and generational trauma of a reform school in the Jim Crow South.

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