10. A REAL PAIN

193 LISTS | 7 TOP SPOTS
Jesse Eisenberg | 90 mins | Comedy/Drama
Kieran Culkin | Jesse Eisenberg | Olha Bosova | Banner Eisenberg

“Jesse Eisenberg gets it. He gets how hard it can be to love somebody who you don’t understand, whose actions inspire and embarrass you in one fell swoop. A Real Pain is about a fraught bond between cousins on a sojourn into the past, both quite literally in the form of a trip to Poland and figuratively in a two-handed unpacking of trauma. Eisenberg never lets the room get overly stuffy or the emotions get too implausible. His second feature is fleet on its feet and wise beyond its years, knowing exactly when to dig in its heels and when to cut and run. Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin both understand each other so deeply as performers, which makes the themes take deep root in your mind. These are fictional characters, yes, but they’re real. You know them; you feel their pain, too.” – Cory Woodroof, USA Today

9. All We Imagine as Light

205 LISTS | 16 TOP SPOTS
Payal Kapadia | 118 mins | Drama/Romance
Kani Kusruti | Divya Prabha | Chhaya Kadam | Hridhu Haroon

““You better get used to impermanence,” says one of the characters in Indian director Payal Kapadia’s gorgeous drama, which reverberates with exquisite and painful sensations of slippage; the women at the film’s center are physically and existentially stuck between stations, looking for a place where happiness might last. For all its potentially schematic elements—mismatched roommates, class-stratified romances, a migration from the anonymity of the city to the intimacy of the seaside—All That We Imagine as Light feels remarkably agile and free-form, a by-product of its maker’s background in documentary and a testament to storytelling instincts at once shrewder and more experimental than even the art-house norms. It’s absurd that Kapadia’s film won’t be competing for Best International Feature at the Oscars, but there’s a silver lining to its award season marginalization: Any movie with such a keen understanding of impermanence is built to last.” – Adam Nayman, The Ringer

8. CONCLAVE

229 LISTS | 14 TOP SPOTS
Edward Berger | 120 mins | Drama/Thriller
Ralph Fiennes | Stanley Tucci | John Lithgow | Lucian Msamati

“Conclave is that rare thing: an enthralling commercial film that is also full of artistry, elevated by Edward Berger’s meticulous direction and Ralph Fiennes’ powerfully subtle performance as a cardinal running the election of a new pope. Berger, whose All Quiet on the Western Front won the best international film Oscar for 2022, gives the film the momentum of a great political thriller as it follows the cardinals’ manipulations, dirty tricks and wheeling and dealing. The cinematography is stunning, with beautifully composed shots full of the rich colours of the cardinals’ robes and the grandeur of the Vatican setting. Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence is all surface calm, yet we see how he is anguished as he questions his own faith. And there are dazzling, sharply honed performances from Stanley Tucci, adding a droll touch as a contender for the top job, John Lithgow as a high-ranking cardinal with scandals to hide, and Isabella Rossellini as a nun who often stands in the background and finally chooses her moment to say a few sharp words. Like the best Hollywood films, Conclave is smart, sophisticated and hugely enjoyable to watch.” – Caryn James, BBC

7. Dune: Part II

280 LISTS | 43 TOP SPOTS
Denis Villeneuve | 166 mins | Action/Adventure/Sci-Fi
Timothee Chalamet | Zendaya | Rebecca Ferguson | Javier Bardem

“There’s a moment in the original “Star Wars” when Luke Skywalker looks out on the desert horizon of his home planet and sees two suns setting in the distance. It’s a simple detail, but one that says so much about how his world is at once just like ours and unknowably different. Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” is the first sci-fi franchise to make us tingle in the same way, and this three-hour follow-up brings it all together. In the first blockbuster back after last year’s industry-stopping labor strikes, we were transported to another world as only Hollywood can. The film delivers a formidable new adversary in Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha, blue Kool-Aid drinking tests of Timothée Chalamet’s chosen-oneness and the incredibly satisfying payoff of Paul Atreides’ sandworm-surfing lessons. Still, it’s the relatable human moments amid Villeneuve’s awe-inspiring vision that bring “Dune: Part Two” down to earth, so to speak. Frank Herbert purists are obsessed with telling you what’s missing, but the real feat here is how dramatically the film simplifies all that arcane plotting into clear story beats, making the mythology feel almost intuitive, the way witnessing a double sunset did half a century earlier.” – Peter Debruge, Variety

6. I Saw the TV Glow

285 LISTS | 42 TOP SPOTS
Jane Schoenbrun | 100 mins | Drama/Horror
Justice Smith | Brigette Lundy-Paine | Ian Foreman | Helena Howard

“One of the most prevalent and frustrating questions about “I Saw the TV Glow” concerns its genre: is this trans-themed coming-of-age drama really a horror movie? Well, yeah. It’s a sometimes tragic and mostly romantic mood piece whose enchanting, destabilizing ambiguity reflects a discomfort with narrative tidiness.

In some interviews about “I Saw the TV Glow,” writer/director Jane Schoenbrun (“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”) talks about the essentially “liminal” headspace of their haunted lead protagonist Owen, initially played by Ian Foreman and then later by Justice Smith. That indeterminate setting is where both Owen and the movie live, more so than the movie’s suburban New Jersey locations or Owen’s favorite queer- and/or adolescent-friendly TV shows from 1990s, like “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Twin Peaks,” and “The X-Files.”

Owen’s attachment to his favorite TV show, “The Pink Opaque,” comes freighted with both a world-defining wrong-ness and an eerie beauty, a complex knot of emotions that colors his relationship with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), the only other person that seems to understand how Owen feels.

So even if you’re uninterested or unaware of the movie’s (pretty clear) subtext, there’s a fair chance that you’ll still be able to not only connect with Owen but with his innate sense that the things he sees in “The Pink Opaque”—and that time, and that friendship—reflect the stomach-churning dread and flickering lure of a time capsule in which we can simultaneously bury and maybe, if we’re lucky, also disinter ourselves.” – Simon Abrams, RogerEbert.com

5. NICKEL BOYS

291 LISTS | 44 TOP SPOTS
RaMell Ross | 140 mins | Drama
Ethan Herisse | Brandon Wilson | Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor | Ethan Cole Sharp

“The best American film of the year is also the most revolutionary, though I’m not sure any other director could have pulled off what RaMell Ross does here. Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Black teenagers being brutalized at a reform school in the Jim Crow South here becomes a startling meditation on perspective and empathy. Ross’s first-person camera allows us to experience his protagonists’ lives through their eyes, which in turn calls into question how such stories of suffering and outrage have been presented in the past. The ambition here is staggering. Ross seeks to do nothing less than to change how we see the world. Shockingly, he succeeds.” – Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

4. The Substance

335 LISTS | 33 TOP SPOTS
Coralie Fargeat | 141 mins | Horror/Dark Comedy
Demi Moore | Margaret Qualley | Dennis Quaid | Edward Hamilton-Clark

“The best scene in Coralie Fargeat’s outrageous black comedy isn’t one of the many gleeful instances of body horror or the plastic-slick re-creations of the lascivious showbiz gaze. No, the best scene is the one in which Elisabeth Sparkle, the aging star played by a go-for-broke Demi Moore, tries and fails to go on a date with an old classmate. She puts on a dress that’s a little too much, does her makeup, puts on her coat, reaches for the door — and can’t quite bring herself to open it, because lurking by her window is a billboard of the younger version she’s killing herself to get back to, all dewy skin and taut flesh. She goes back, she redoes and then claws at her face in the mirror, she glares at the person she’s had the temerity to age into, and at that moment we understand that she’s never going to save herself, and that after years of being subjected to Hollywood standards, she’s constructed a prison in her own mind from which there’s no escape. The Substance gives us splitting spines and eyeballs doubling in sockets and mutants spraying blood all over an audience in formalwear (that crying child, I cackled!), and it’s all fantastic and excessive, but at its core is a genuine emotional rawness about the ways in which we become warped and addicted to the systems that harm us.” – Alison Willmore, Vulture

3. Challengers

339 LISTS | 34 TOP SPOTS
Luca Guadagnino | 131 mins | Drama/Romance/Comedy
Mike Faist | Josh O'Connor | Zendaya | Darnell Appling

“Luca Guadagnino’s top-spinning marvel of a movie tells the tale of three pretty young tennis pros: their friendships, their rivalries, their love matches, their games. It’s about everything that can happen between three people, but it’s not about anything more than that. It has no higher theme. Yet it’s the most searching love triangle movie since “Jules and Jim,” as well as the most sweeping and sophisticated piece of cinematic storytelling I saw all year. Guadagnino, in a bedazzling piece of directing, keeps the audience both immersed and off balance, tracing the karmic tension of romance and power as it plays out among his extraordinary actors: Mike Faist as the cool, diffident, upright Art, Josh O’Connor (in the best performance by a male actor this year) as the ardent bad boy Patrick, and Zendaya, asserting the raw magnetism of her chops in a way she never quite has on the big screen before, as the fierce and fearless Tashi, who comes between them. Justin Kuritzkes’ script is a sporty maze that Guadagnino elevates into dizzying eye-candy poetry, surveying the rules of attraction from every side of the court, revealing the unconscious surge of love’s push and pull.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

2. The Brutalist

343 LISTS | 58 TOP SPOTS
Brady Corbet | 215 mins | Drama
Adrien Brody | Felicity Jones | Guy Pearce | Joe Alwyn

“Everything is monumental in director Brady Corbet’s rich historical epic, from a gorgeous music score and production design to a yearslong narrative that takes a hard look at the immigrant experience and what happens when the “American dream” is held just out of arm’s length. After surviving the Holocaust, a Hungarian Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) comes to America and is commissioned by an industrialist (Guy Pearce) to build a community center, while trying to bring his wife (Felicity Jones) over from Europe and weathering his own ego and vices. And like “Conclave,” the drama presents a soulful, revealing ending that adds something significant to our cultural conversation.” – Brian Truitt, USA Today

1. Anora

523 LISTS | 80 TOP SPOTS
Sean Baker | 139 mins | Romance/Comedy/Drama
Mikey Madison | Mark Eydelshteyn | Paul Weissman | Anton Bitter

“In a few of the many conversations I’ve had about Anora this year, I compared the phenomenon of its reception to that of Parasite in 2019. The analogy isn’t perfect: Parasite’s yearlong reign as a critical and popular smash signaled a shift from a Hollywood-centric film industry to a global one, while Anora’s more modest box-office success (a tidy $25 million on its $6 million budget) mostly just signals that writer-director Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) will be free to make whatever movie he wants next. But Parasite and Anora do have some important elements in common: Both are sharply observed studies of class relations—specifically, the relations between the plutocratic one percent and the service class that labors to satisfy their every kooky, exploitive whim. Both films work at once as sociological parables and as detailed character portraits of specific and unforgettable people. Above all, both movies are surefire crowd-pleasers, capable of captivating audiences from roughly age 15 to age 84 and beyond (I based that last number on the age of my mother, who saw Anora on my recommendation and loved it). Baker’s keen eye for detail gives you the sense you’ve been dropped into a complete preexisting world, while his uncanny touch with actors makes every performance seem coaxed from a real person somehow playing a version of themself (though the cast is mainly made up of experienced performers). I won’t soon forget Mikey Madison’s spiky yet vulnerable Ani taking on three burly thugs with nothing but a floor lamp, a powerful pole-dance-trained kick in the face, and an indomitable spirit. And if you can make it through Anora’s final five minutes without being deeply moved, you might want to take the Turing test.” – Dana Stevens, Slate

Full List:

R	TITLE	L	#1	AR	L%	#1%	TCL	TCL1	TCL%	TCL1%
1	Anora	523	80	4.06	48.9%	10.2%	81	8	46.6%	5.5%
2	The Brutalist	343	58	4.10	32.1%	7.4%	73	12	42.0%	8.2%
3	Challengers	339	34	4.62	31.7%	4.4%	55	5	31.6%	3.4%
4	The Substance	335	33	5.28	31.3%	4.2%	42	2	24.1%	1.4%
5	Nickel Boys	291	44	4.32	27.2%	5.6%	72	15	41.4%	10.3%
6	I Saw the TV Glow	285	42	4.62	26.6%	5.4%	50	11	28.7%	7.5%
7	Dune: Part Two	280	43	4.15	26.2%	5.5%	37	6	21.3%	4.1%
8	Conclave	229	14	5.21	21.4%	1.8%	27	1	15.5%	0.7%
9	All We Imagine as Light	205	16	4.78	19.2%	2.0%	38	6	21.8%	4.1%
10	A Real Pain	193	7	5.74	18.0%	0.9%	46	1	26.4%	0.7%
11	Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World	186	25	4.40	17.7%	3.3%	41	6	23.6%	4.1%
12	Wicked: Part One	182	11	4.91	17.0%	1.4%	21	3	12.1%	2.1%
13	Sing Sing	181	13	5.04	16.9%	1.7%	22	1	12.6%	0.7%
14	Hard Truths	171	9	4.70	16.0%	1.2%	45	2	25.9%	1.4%
15	A Different Man	162	11	5.43	15.1%	1.4%	18	0	10.3%	0.0%
16	The Beast	157	31	4.00	14.8%	4.0%	25	9	14.4%	6.2%
17	Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga	157	14	5.42	14.7%	1.8%	32	4	18.4%	2.7%
18	Nosferatu	151	6	5.42	14.1%	0.8%	20	1	11.5%	0.7%
19	Love Lies Bleeding	137	5	5.48	12.8%	0.6%	16	1	9.2%	0.7%
20	Evil Does Not Exist	135	6	5.57	12.8%	0.8%	28	1	16.1%	0.7%
21	The Wild Robot	133	11	5.54	12.4%	1.4%	13	0	7.5%	0.0%
22	Janet Planet	128	4	5.40	12.0%	0.5%	23	0	13.2%	0.0%
23	No Other Land	125	10	4.91	11.7%	1.3%	28	3	16.1%	2.1%
24	The Seed of the Sacred Fig	115	10	4.90	10.8%	1.3%	28	1	16.1%	0.7%
25	Juror #2	112	3	5.95	10.5%	0.4%	19	0	10.9%	0.0%
26	A Complete Unknown	111	4	5.32	10.4%	0.5%	15	1	8.6%	0.7%
27	Civil War	108	9	5.24	10.1%	1.2%	19	0	10.9%	0.0%
28	Flow	104	2	6.55	9.7%	0.3%	21	1	12.1%	0.7%
29	Last Summer (2024)	97	4	5.69	9.1%	0.5%	18	1	10.3%	0.7%
29	Hundreds of Beavers	97	4	6.04	9.1%	0.5%	23	1	13.2%	0.7%
31	Hit Man	93	1	6.74	8.7%	0.1%	17	1	9.8%	0.7%
32	Dahomey	90	5	5.56	8.4%	0.6%	11	0	6.3%	0.0%
33	Close Your Eyes	86	15	4.16	8.2%	1.9%	24	6	13.8%	4.1%
34	Emilia Perez	86	5	5.25	8.0%	0.6%	18	2	10.3%	1.4%
35	Queer	85	1	5.75	7.9%	0.1%	12	0	6.9%	0.0%
36	Red Rooms	83	6	5.51	7.8%	0.8%	13	0	7.5%	0.0%
37	His Three Daughters	74	3	6.19	7.0%	0.4%	20	2	11.5%	1.4%
38	Megalopolis	73	2	6.46	6.8%	0.3%	14	0	8.0%	0.0%
39	Longlegs	73	1	5.61	6.8%	0.1%	6	0	3.4%	0.0%
40	September 5	70	4	5.71	6.5%	0.5%	11	0	6.3%	0.0%
41	Between the Temples	65	2	6.39	6.1%	0.3%	11	1	6.3%	0.7%
42	The People's Joker	63	2	6.05	5.9%	0.3%	9	1	5.2%	0.7%
43	Universal Language	62	2	5.98	5.8%	0.3%	16	0	9.2%	0.0%
44	Inside Out 2	61	3	5.45	5.7%	0.4%	9	1	5.2%	0.7%
45	Rebel Ridge	60	1	6.47	5.6%	0.1%	8	0	4.6%	0.0%
46	Good One	58	2	6.44	5.4%	0.3%	17	2	9.8%	1.4%
47	Trap	56	0	7.90	5.2%	0.0%	9	0	5.2%	0.0%
48	Green Border	55	4	5.60	5.2%	0.5%	21	2	12.1%	1.4%
49	My Old Ass	55	2	6.45	5.1%	0.3%	13	0	7.5%	0.0%
50	Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat	54	6	5.20	5.0%	0.8%	13	1	7.5%	0.7%
51	About Dry Grasses	50	3	4.74	5.0%	0.4%	13	0	7.5%	0.0%
52	Ghostlight	53	3	5.00	5.0%	0.4%	9	0	5.2%	0.0%
53	The Room Next Door	51	1	6.51	4.8%	0.1%	13	0	7.5%	0.0%
54	Babygirl	50	1	6.51	4.7%	0.1%	16	1	9.2%	0.7%
54	Deadpool & Wolverine	50	1	6.29	4.7%	0.1%	2	0	1.1%	0.0%
56	The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed	47	1	5.62	4.5%	0.1%	3	0	1.7%	0.0%
57	Memoir of a Snail	46	1	6.41	4.3%	0.1%	9	0	5.2%	0.0%
58	Strange Darling	44	2	5.97	4.1%	0.3%	5	0	2.9%	0.0%
59	Didi	42	3	5.22	3.9%	0.4%	4	0	2.3%	0.0%
60	Kneecap	42	2	5.30	3.9%	0.3%	2	0	1.1%	0.0%
61	Thelma (2024)	41	0	6.78	3.8%	0.0%	4	0	2.3%	0.0%
62	How to Have Sex	36	0	7.25	3.7%	0.0%	8	0	4.6%	0.0%
63	Kinds of Kindness	39	3	6.52	3.6%	0.4%	5	0	2.9%	0.0%
64	I'm Still Here (2024)	38	2	5.43	3.6%	0.3%	9	2	5.2%	1.4%
65	Heretic	38	2	6.70	3.6%	0.3%	3	0	1.7%	0.0%
66	The Human Surge 3	36	2	5.50	3.5%	0.3%	5	0	2.9%	0.0%
67	The Apprentice	37	0	7.06	3.5%	0.0%	4	0	2.3%	0.0%
68	Alien: Romulus	36	2	6.29	3.4%	0.3%	3	0	1.7%	0.0%
69	Gladiator II	36	1	6.32	3.4%	0.1%	3	0	1.7%	0.0%
70	Rap World	35	2	6.40	3.3%	0.3%	2	0	1.1%	0.0%
71	The Fall Guy	34	1	7.73	3.2%	0.1%	7	0	4.0%	0.0%
72	Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell	33	4	5.52	3.1%	0.5%	8	0	4.6%	0.0%
73	Saturday Night	33	3	5.73	3.1%	0.4%	6	1	3.4%	0.7%
74	Christmas Eve in Miller's Point	33	2	5.67	3.1%	0.3%	11	0	6.3%	0.0%
75	Monkey Man	33	0	7.39	3.1%	0.0%	1	0	0.6%	0.0%
76	Chime	31	2	5.79	2.9%	0.3%	10	0	5.7%	0.0%
77	A Traveler's Needs	31	2	6.41	2.9%	0.3%	1	0	0.6%	0.0%
78	The First Omen	31	0	7.15	2.9%	0.0%	6	0	3.4%	0.0%
79	Smile 2	30	0	7.33	2.8%	0.0%	7	0	4.0%	0.0%
80	Late Night With the Devil	29	0	6.65	2.7%	0.0%	1	0	0.6%	0.0%
81	The Bikeriders	29	2	5.94	2.7%	0.3%	6	1	3.4%	0.7%
82	Blitz	28	3	5.54	2.6%	0.4%	5	1	2.9%	0.7%
83	Here	28	1	7.00	2.6%	0.1%	10	1	5.7%	0.7%
84	Problemista	26	0	5.60	2.5%	0.0%	1	0	0.6%	0.0%
85	Femme	25	2	5.58	2.4%	0.3%	4	1	2.3%	0.7%
86	Robot Dreams	23	1	5.38	2.3%	0.1%	4	1	2.3%	0.7%
87	Twisters	25	0	7.54	2.3%	0.0%	1	0	0.6%	0.0%
88	The Order	24	0	7.00	2.2%	0.0%	4	0	2.3%	0.0%
89	Aggro Dr1ft	23	3	2.94	2.2%	0.4%	3	1	1.7%	0.7%
90	Small Things Like These	23	1	7.38	2.1%	0.1%	5	1	2.9%	0.7%
91	Rumours	22	1	6.73	2.1%	0.1%	3	0	1.7%	0.0%
92	Bird (2024)	22	0	7.35	2.1%	0.0%	4	0	2.3%	0.0%
93	Vermiglio	22	0	5.64	2.1%	0.0%	3	0	1.7%	0.0%
94	The Piano Lesson	22	0	7.00	2.1%	0.0%	3	0	1.7%	0.0%
95	Exhibiting Forgiveness	21	2	6.45	2.0%	0.3%	4	1	2.3%	0.7%
96	Maria	21	1	6.91	2.0%	0.1%	2	0	1.1%	0.0%
97	Harvest	20	0	4.50	1.9%	0.0%	1	0	0.6%	0.0%
98	The Last Showgirl	20	1	6.06	1.9%	0.1%	3	0	1.7%	0.0%
99	Stress Positions	20	0	7.14	1.9%	0.0%	2	0	1.1%	0.0%
99	Lisa Frankenstein	20	0	6.93	1.9%	0.0%	1	0	0.6%	0.0%
99	Will & Harper	20	0	7.94	1.9%	0.0%	3	0	1.7%	0.0%

Lists Included 1,070 | Top Critics Included 174

R Rank
L Total number of lists where the film was selected as one of the top 10 films of the year
AR Average position on ranked top 10 lists
#1 Total number of lists where the film was selected as the best film of the year
L% Percentage of total lists where the film was selected as one of the top 10 films of the year
#1% Percentage of mentions where the film was selected as the best film of the year
TCL Number of times that the film was selected as one of the top 10 films of the year on top critics’ lists
TCL1 Number of times that the film was selected as the best film of the year on top critics’ lists
TCL% Percentage of times that the film was selected as one of the top 10 films of the year on top critics’ lists
TCL1% Percentage of lists where the film was selected as the best film of the year on top critics’ lists