- Photo 1:
- Neon
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- Neon
How does your opinion on the best movies of the 2024 line up with Rolling Stone's list of the year's best cinema? That's what we're here to figure out by asking movie fans of every stripe to vote on the venerable publication's annual movie roundup by the the great David Fear, the Senior Editor and critic at Rolling Stone.
Fear's picks for the best film of ‘24 run the gamut, highlighting films as wildly different as Dahomey (a documentary about how artifacts pilfered from the Kingdom of Dahomey represent the all-too-lively legacy of colonialism) and The Substance (an instant body horror classic that lets Demi Moore go buckwild while slicing and dicing ideas of contemporary beauty). Dune: Part Two, which sits atop Ranker’s own crowdsourced list of the best 2024 movies, also appears on Fear's list, but where Ranker voters made it their #1, Fear has it in the #17 spot.
His original rankings are included here, as are excerpts from his evaluations of each film, but to get a full sense of his picks, read the whole piece, which includes beautiful writing and food for thought that's a feast for any cinephile.
- 1
#12 according to Rolling Stone
“An absolutely radical work of art, spilling over with radical empathy.”
- Released: 2024
- Directed by: RaMell Ross
- 2
#17 according to Rolling Stone
“Denis Villeneuve makes good — very good — on the promise of his 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s doorstopper of a sci-fi novel, picking up where he left off (roughly past the book’s halfway point) and digging into the themes of power, morality, revolution and what happens when a reluctant messiah embraces his destiny not wisely but too well.”
- Released: 2024
- Directed by: Denis Villeneuve
- 3
#8 according to Rolling Stone
"The Substance won’t reset society’s fixation on youth or cure Hollywood’s hypocritical, hyper-[misogynist] ills. It will, however, remind you that when you’re chasing your past by any means necessary, you are always your own worst enemy."
- Released: 2024
- Directed by: Coralie Fargeat
- 4
#4 according to Rolling Stone
“Just your typical boy-meets-girl romp, if the boy was a Russian oligarch’s filthy rich son and the girl was an exotic dancer/escort from Brooklyn who accepts his impromptu marriage proposal.”
- Released: 2024
- Directed by: Sean Baker
- 5
#18 according to Rolling Stone
“There’s zero dialogue, the animation looks like a cut scene from The Legend of Zelda, and, in what feels like the boldest of moves, director Gints Zilbalodis forgoes any easy attempts to anthropomorphize these creatures — it’s a little like watching the most thrilling nature documentary ever sketched.”
- Released: 2024
- Directed by: Gints Zilbalodis
- 6
#14 according to Rolling Stone
“Based on Sarah Varon’s 2007 graphic novel, Pablo Berger’s animated buddy dramedy treats that idea as a given, pairing an anthropomorphic dog and his some-assembly-required robot best friend as they tool around a cartoon New York City.”
- Released: 2023
- Directed by: Pablo Berger
