At Little White Lies, we don’t believe there’s such a thing as a “bad year” for cinema in terms of the work produced. Working under the pressure of an industry still recovering from political and social turmoil in the face of society that seems increasingly hostile to art, we’re heartened to see so many artists still managing to create truly great cinema. After much deliberation within the team, we’ve put together our list of 30 great films that came out of this year.
The list runs from 1 February 2024 to 31 January 2025 (to account a little bit for some early US releases) so it’s not an exact science – there are plenty of personal favourites which got left off too. But we hope you’ll take the time to seek out of all of these wonderful films. Let us know your favourites over on Bluesky.
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Dir. Agnieszka Holland
Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland has proven with her many diverse endeavours over the years that she can successfully try her hand at any type of film or TV series – but Green Border is a film which should be counted among her most personal and most nuanced to date. That this harrowing tale of refugees stranded between the borders of Belarus and Poland would emerge in a year where such stories are rife in our newspapers adds a haunting resonance to its story, and it’s one told by a director who clearly has decades of hard emotional experience under her belt. David Jenkins
Directed by Steve McQueen
Of the films that Steve McQueen made in 2024, we think that the first one – Occupied City – pips his lavish period drama, Blitz, to a spot in our top 30 ranking. The former sees the filmmaker deliver a coldly forensic study of how evil settles its roots in a community, adapted from a book written by his partner, Bianca Stigter, called Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940 – 1945. It’s a film of breathtaking formal rigour and, like some of McQueen’s best gallery work, an attempt to reflect scale through the sheer breadth of collected detail. DJ
Directed by Sean Durkin
“We all know Kerry’s my favourite,” Fritz Von Erich tells his sons as they sit around the breakfast table. “Then Kev, then David, then Mike. But the rankings can always change.” It seems so ludicrous as to be comical – a father nakedly pitting his children against one another over bacon and eggs – but Sean Durkin’s sports drama is ever so sincere, relaying the story of a wrestling dynasty founded by a single-minded abusive parent and subject to notable tragedies throughout their lives. With an impeccable casting comprising Holt McCallany as Fritz and Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White and Harris Dickinson as his sons, it’s a bruising story of fraternity and masculinity that cuts down to the bone. Hannah Strong
Directed by Zoë Kravitz
There’s always the desire to dash for the exits when you see that a film actor has crossed the Rubicon and chosen to try their hand at writing and directing. Yet with Blink Twice, Zoë Kravitz proved herself to be something of a natural, with her inspired, witty and no-punch-pulling thrilled about a wide-eyed waitress (Naomi Ackie) who is spirited away to a paradise island by a dashing tech bro (Channing Tatum) where the good time party vibe is soon interrupted by all manner of unspeakable activities. It’s one of the year’s most brilliantly edited films (a high compliment!) and we can’t wait to see what Kravitz has up her sleeves next. DJ
Directed by Tran Anh Hung
If Luna Carmoon’s Hoard (see Number 16) was a film that piqued our sense of smell, Tran Anh Hung’s account of fictional early 20th century French gourmand Dodin-Bouffant was one that sent paroxisms of pleasure directly to our tastebuds. This is Tik-Tok food porn elevated to the level of high art, with the careful production of mouth-watering pleasures wrapped around a lilting romance between Benoît Magimel mercurial Dodin, and his chef/lover Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). DJ
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
When a director makes two films in the space of a year, you assume it’ll be a classic case of “one for them, one for me”. Yet Kinds of Kindness – like Poor Things before it – is a work that feels like it was snuck in through the back door by its director Yorgos Lanthimos, a trio of surreal, saucy, doom-laden tales about false profits and how the sub/dom dichotomy relates to so much more in life than just sex. DJ
Dirs. Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
One of the most vital releases of 2024, not least because its plea for peaceable dialogue and for humanity to look beyond the synthetic constructs of borders and race managed to rub a lot of awful people up the wrong way. An ad hoc collaboration between Palestinian videographer Basel Adra and Israeli director Yuval Abraham, No Other Land offers a critique of Israel’s aggressive expansionism into the west bank before conflict officially broke out, and is just a deeply emotional paean to collaboration, documentation and resistance. DJ
Directed by Rich Peppiat
Cocaine, shagging, and a cameo from Jerry Adams – the eponymous rap trio from Belfast caused quite a stir this year with their meta music biopic, blurring the lines between fiction and reality with raucous results. Putting the Irish language front and centre and raging against the machine of British imperialism, they sent the tabloid press into a sputtering tailspin and gained legions of new fans the world over. Brits Out indeed. HS
Directed by Halina Reijn
For many years critics and audiences alike have mourned the loss of eroticism in mainstream cinema – weep no more, cinema lovers, as Halina Reijn, Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson are here to change all that with their sexually charged dramedy about a high-flying CEO who embarks on an affair with her much younger colleague. Reijn’s refreshingly candid approach to sex on screen sees her capture the messy, funny often awkward side of intimacy, and with Kidman on top form, it’s a romp in the truest sense of the word. HS
Directed by Elizabeth Sankey
After giving birth to her first child, filmmaker and musician Elizabeth Sankey experienced severe post-portum depression and was treated in a specialist mother and baby psychiatric unit. She recounts her experience in this moving documentary, which draws connections between the historical treatment of women in culture and healthcare and fictional depictions of witches. Unfailingly candid about a subject many are either unable or unwilling to confront, Witches is a tender, inventive film that takes on a devastating issue with appropriate care. HS
Directed by Clint Eastwood
He may be 94 years young, but Clint Eastwood proves with his latest, Juror #2, that he has very much still got game as a director of rich genre fare. It was dumped haphazardly into US cinemas, but found a loyal following quickly among critics when they saw that beyond the slick courtroom thriller façade was a sophisticated and ambiguous study on the limits of the law when it comes to adjudication on the complex, irrational and absurd actions of human beings. DJ
Directed by George Miller
While I’ll be shot in the face at close range with a vintage modified sawn-off for saying this, I’ll say it anyway: Furiosa > Fury Road. Not by much, but by a meaningful margin. George Miller’s action prequel charts the origin story of one-armed rage queen and sharp-shooter, as she’s plucked from paradise as a youngling and then set off on a grandiose revenge mission thereafter. Anya Taylor-Joy slinks into the role of the double-hard road warrior, while Tom Burke is superb as her supercool helpmeet, Pretorian Jack. DJ
Directed by Alice Lowe
It feels like there’s less and less space in the industry for filmmakers to take a creative roll of the dice and make a film which doesn’t adhere to tried and tested norms. Alice Lowe’s second feature is even more of a marvel in that sense, as she writes, directs and stars in this time-skipping tale of unrequited love through the ages that employs a bold structural gambit and is packed to the gills with humour and insight. This preceptive study on the microscopically thin line between romance and stalking dismantles cinematic norms while building a beautifully wonky and lovable edifice of its own. DJ
Directed by Luna Carmoon
Olefactory cinema par excellence, debut writer/director Luna Carmoon whacks it out of the park with this stinky, slimy, sexy urban drama about writing bodies and rubbish piles in working class suburbia. Saura Lightfoot Leon and Joseph Quinn astonish as the tactile would-be lovers, while Haley Squires is superb as the single-mother trash hoarder whose obsessions and kinks rub off on her impressionable daughter. Roll on feature number two! DJ
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Luca Guadagnino had a busy 2024, with Challengers and Queer premiering six months apart. His second collaboration with Justin Kuritzkes, the latter adapted William S. Burroughs’ novella of the same name, with the author’s fictionalised stand-in down and out in Mexico City, trying – and often failing – to woo an ethereal ex-serviceman who he can’t quite pin down. Featuring Daniel Craig’s best work in years and a star-making turn from Drew Starkey, it’s another swooning entry into the Guadagnino Desire Canon, and we couldn’t be happier about it. HS
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
People talking in rooms never sounds like a very fun time on paper, but Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has come to the point in his career he can make this very spartan dramatic set-up feel like high art. A disgruntled, pompous country school teacher has his haughty perceptions challenged by pupils and colleagues, leading to a sardonic, but sincerely philosophical study which drills into the question of professional purpose and what we’re really meant to spend our time doing while on this little rock. DJ
Directed by Victor Erice
On the bench for over 30 years following the release of 1992’s sublime documentary about art and creativity, The Quince Tree Sun, Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice finally returns with a laconic old school marvel which combines the loose structure of a cosy mystery (a filmmaker trying to discover the whereabouts of a colleague who went missing), with a deep, fascinating and breathtaking inquiry into how cinema can be a very real part of our collective memory. DJ
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun
As assured a sophomore feature as you’re ever likely to see, Schoenbrun’s haunting Bildungsroman pays tribute to the pivotal influence pop culture can have on us in our youth, providing portals to other worlds and helping us discover who we are. Beyond being a loving tribute to their own influences – notably Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Schoenbrun’s film is an expression of hope, reassuring trans and queer viewers that it’s never too late to become your authentic self, and that repression only leads to heartbreak in the end. HS
Directed by Richard Linklater
Play this in a double feature with Eastwood’s Juror #2! Deceptively featherlight caper in with Actual Real Movie Star #1 Glen Powell goes full chameleon mode as Gary Johnson, a doofus collage philosophy professor who moonlights as a fake assassin for the local police constabulary in order to lure in potential marks. And it turns out that his toughest assignment… was love. Linklater keeps things fast and frisky, and everything leads up towards a single scene that forever justifies the existence and application of smart phones. DJ
Directed by Mati Diop
Deserved Golden Bear winner at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, Mati Diop’s stunning, medium-length essay feature searches for a definition of the term “national treasure” and what it means that 26 purloined treasures are being returned to their home nation of Benin France. Diop presents a multiplicity of voices and interpretations on this situation, opening out both a discussion on the problem of western museums being packed to the rafters with plunder from colonial times. DJ
Directed by Rungano Nyoni
All the ingredients were there in Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s 2017 debut feature, I Am Not a Witch, and frankly it’s something of a travesty that we had to wait seven long years for a follow-up. But when this new one arrived, it expanded on that promise in new and exciting ways, telling of ritualised cycles of abuse within an extended family and one woman’s surreal and stifled attempts to hold the abusers to account. DJ
Directed by Annie Baker
There’s a high chance you blinked and missed the scintillating and confident debut feature from lauded playwright Annie Baker when it whisked through UK cinemas, but we wanted to give this wonderful film, about a disquieting mother-daughter relationship in an American rural setting, the dues it so obviously deserves. In its quiet, rigorously observational mode, it served as extension to Baker’s stage work, but also tipped its hat to the transcendental masters of yore such as Ozu and Antonioni. DJ
Directed by Andrea Arnold
I’ll admit: I was something of an Andrea Arnold agnostic ahead of Bird. It definitely wasn’t an intense dislike, more that I swayed to the extremes of love (Wuthering Heights, Cow) and hate (American Honey). This new one represents everything she does well, but with an added twist, cutting the spiky social realism through with a sprinkle of fairy dust in the form of a lovable loner played by Franz Rogowski, who helps save young Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams) from all manner of social and familial hazards. Gorgeous, moving stuff. DJ
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
The film that launched a thousand memes, our favourite Italian provocateur teamed up with YouTube legend (and Mr. Celine Song) Justin Kuritzkes for this cheeky, sporty take on Jules et Jim. Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist are the power-hungry tennis pros who enter each others’ orbit as teens and find themselves butting heads on and off the court across their adult lives – it’s a spiky, sexy, sweaty dramedy about negotiating the rules of desire, and the killer score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross certainly gets the blood pumping too. HS
Directed by Mike Leigh
Nearly 30 years after they collaborated on Secrets & Lies, Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste reunite – and aren’t we lucky, because the result is the finest British film of the year. Jean-Baptiste gives an incendiary performance as Pansy Deacon, a hard-faced woman with an acid tongue who spends every waking moment picking fights, gamely matched by The Bill’s own Michele Austin as her long-suffering sister Chantelle. It’s a moving, tragic, at times extremely funny portrait of a single family’s complex dynamics, delivered as only Mike Leigh knows how, with no triumphant catharsis or easy reconciliations. HS
Directed by Payal Kapadia
Having impressed with her experimental debut The Night of Knowing Nothing, the Indian filmmaker opted to expand her horizons with a Mumbai-set city symphony which revolves around the lives of three melancholic women of different generations. The film is singularly interested in the emotions and the interior worlds of these women, yet it’s also richly political in its focus on caste, gentrification and anti-Muslim sentiment in modern India. The year’s best ending. DJ
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher
La Chimera was Alice Rohrwacher’s “I can do pretty much anything now” movie, a piece of work that from some angles looks completely shapeless and meandering, and from others elegantly structured and purposeful. Josh O’Connor (in his second top 10 appearance) stars as a linen-suited rogue who hangs out with a gang of charismatic tomb raiders who travel the Italian landscape in search of antiquities and more. Rohrwacher’s sincere interest in history and archaeology soon gives way to matters existential, and the story shifts to examine more romantic concerns. DJ
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
We didn’t get around to giving this one its dues in our 2023 list, even though that’s when it premiered, so we can only echo the many hundreds – if not thousands – of people who have lauded Jonathan Glazer’s singular exploration into the ambient qualities of the Holocaust, and the banality of evil at its most aggressively banal. Like RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, it’s a film which reframes and recontextualises atrocity through subjective human experience, and once seen it is very much never forgotten. DJ
Directed by Brady Corbet
Brady Corbet’s long-in-the-oven VistaVision spectacular channels the look, feel and scope of classic-era Hollywood epics in telling the tale of a fictional émigré architect (magnificently essayed by Adrien Brody) who strives to find both work and an artistic outlet (and perhaps even both at the same time) in the mighty landscapes of America. It’s a knotty, mysterious picture that begs for interpretation, and that sound you can hear in the background is PT Anderson watching his back. DJ
Directed by RaMell Ross
As if our entire issue wasn’t enough of a testament to how much we admire RaMell Ross’s fiction debut, let us say a few more words. It was clear back when Hale County This Morning, This Evening premiered that RaMell Ross was an extraordinarily gifted filmmaker, and his fiction debut sees him turn his photographic eye to Coulson Whitehead’s eponymous novel with astounding grace and empathy. In less skilled hands the project might have been mawkish or exploitative; under Ross, it is tender and immersive, quite literally allowing us to see the horror of the Nickel Academy through Elwood Curtis’s eyes. With Ethan Herisse, Brandon Turner and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor delivering a trio of heavyweight performances and Ross’s entire creative team working at the top of their game, it represents a towering achievement in cinematic storytelling and provides a slither of hope that the victims of the real-life reform schools of the American south will finally see justice. HS
