The Skinny's Films of 2024

10. Love Lies Bleeding

Dir. Rose Glass

Love Lies Bleeding, Rose Glass’s sophomore feature, is a sapphic grindhouse version of Pumping Iron: all fluids (sweat, spit, egg yolk) and veins pulsing out of skin to the beat of a neon 80s soundtrack.

Jackie (Katy O’Brian) is a drifter and wannabe champion bodybuilder who walks into Lou (a mulleted Kristen Stewart)’s gym, and subsequently, right into her heart, with their love story evolving into a messy and phantasmagoric lesbian crime caper. No other film this year can claim to have featured a meet-cute that involves injecting steroids into someone’s ass or K-Stew being swallowed and spit back up by her lover, encased in goo – and they’re the worse off for it. [Katie Driscoll]

Love Lies Bleeding is streaming on Prime Video and available to rent elsewhere

9. Kneecap

Dir. Rich Peppiatt

For those whose memories of Irish class are falling asleep face down on their textbook during explanations of the modh coinníollach, the Kneecap movie is here to kick the doors down and remind you the Irish language is dynamic, beautiful and worth fighting for. The Belfast rap trio's debut film appearance is a riotous good time that shows us biopics don't have to be boring, conventionally structured or stiff – this one incorporates the surreal (claymation drug-induced hallucination anyone?), Michael Fassbender doing yoga and most importantly: great music. Next stop is the Oscars, where the Kneecap trio of Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvai are representing Ireland for Best International Feature. Best of luck to you – or should that be, go n-éirí leat, buachaillí! You won't need it. [Emilie Roberts]

Kneecap is streaming on Prime Video and available to rent elsewhere

8. All of Us Strangers

Dir. Andrew Haigh

Characters are often haunted in the films of Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years), but in this bruising study of grief, the spectres are literal. Andrew Scott is devastating as Adam, a lonely screenwriter who’s trying to pen a story about his parents, who died when he was 12. His solitary life is interrupted both by a knock at the door from a horny neighbour (played by Paul Mescal) and a return to his childhood home, where he mysteriously finds Mum and Dad (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) alive and well. Fantastical the plot may be, but the emotions being picked at (childhood loss, queer alienation, gay desire) are heartbreakingly tender and real, and the Christmas setting provides a pleasing dusting of festive melancholy. [Jamie Dunn]

All of Us Strangers is streaming on Disney+ and available to rent elsewhere

7. Poor Things

Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things is a moving celebration of curiosity with Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter as its pulsating heart and brain. Inspired by Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, this Victorian anatomical fable chronicles Bella’s liberation on a meticulously crafted steampunk mood board. Stone’s Frankenstein's Monster-like creation harnesses her candour to reclaim control of the monstrous feminine, morphing into a fully fleshed being on a quest for purpose and pleasure. The men orbiting around her, meanwhile, are exposed as comically desperate figures.

Poor Things is an uproarious, occasionally squeamish story of (gender-based) violence concerned with who holds the scalpel and who lies on the table. Bella reflects on personal and collective responsibility throughout, emerging as a sharp mistress of her own destiny. [Stefania Sarrubba]

Poor Things is streaming on Disney+ and available to rent elsewhere

6. I Saw the TV Glow

Dir. Jane Schoenbrun

Central to Jane Schoenbrun’s suburban, dysphoric fantasy horror is the exposed truth of 'nostalgia' – that it’s a way of misremembering the past, an act of imagination that obscures material reality. But I Saw the TV Glow also supposes that nostalgia preserves, to an unhealthy extent, an emotional state that is comfortable to remain in instead of discovering a reality-shifting new horizon. Schoenbrun’s aching, synthesised exploration of a key chapter in the trans experience centres on choice for its timid, disaffected young protagonist (Justice Smith), and builds a potent sense of dread and inevitability for every indecisive, hesitant second he waits. [Rory Doherty]

I Saw the TV Glow is available to rent at Google Play and elsewhere

5. Anora

Dir. Sean Baker

Anora is a comedy – until it isn’t. Mikey Madison is unapologetically brash as sex worker Ani, who fills almost every scene with personality and charm; her would-be beau, Ivan, slapsticks his way to endearment despite being the money-burning son of a shady Russian oligarch; the hired hands and sidekicks hired by Ivan's family to break up the young lovers are hapless and clumsy. And in the last ten minutes, director Sean Baker makes you reevaluate everything you’ve just laughed at. Was that love story ever genuine? No matter how empowered you are, is all labour just exploitation? How does it feel to no longer be looked at, but seen? [Tony Inglis]

Anora is currently in cinemas

4. Perfect Days

Dir. Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days is about life’s biggest questions and its everyday trials. It’s about where the most meaningful core of our existence lies and how much we have to cut away to get there. And it’s about a guy who cleans toilets.

That guy is Hirayama, played by Kōji Yakusho in a performance that’s as meditative and mesmerising as the film itself. Hirayama lives a monastic existence, attending each daily task with an absolute focus. The moments of contentment he finds, whether enjoying a sandwich beneath a sun-dappled tree or blaring Lou Reed’s titular track on the drive home, are utterly enveloping. Is this a life of blissful solitude or simple loneliness? The film offers no easy answers, just a warm and quiet space to think about the question. [Ross McIndoe]

Perfect Days is streaming on MUBI and available to rent elsewhere

3. Challengers

Dir. Luca Guadagnino

It may seem strange that – in the year that brought us Gladiator II, Twisters and Furiosa – the most edge-of-your-seat, adrenaline-in-your-mouth film evolved around a game of tennis between two washed-up players and a failed polycule, but that’s the power of irrepressible Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino. His long-anticipated sports drama Challengers is a race to the proverbial bottom (because in this game, there’s only one top), where tennis plays out like sex and sex plays out like a grudge match. Exhilarating, sweaty, and backed by an unhinged techno score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Challengers is the epitome of Here We Fucking Go cinema, a frenetic ode to the power of desire to make you worse, actually. [Anahit Berhooz]

Challengers is streaming on Prime Video and available to rent elsewhere

2. The Zone of Interest

Dir. Jonathan Glazer

There are two films in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest: the film we see and the film we hear. As the Höss family enjoys an idyllic life in their dream home next to Auschwitz, the faint shouts and gunshots, and the constant low hum of the machinery of death, remind us of the atrocities being committed next door. The Zone of Interest is about the things we choose not to see and hear, the lies we swallow and the bubbles we create to cut ourselves off from the horrific reality that surrounds us, and no film this year more potently represents the world as it is in 2024. [Philip Concannon]

The Zone of Interest is streaming on Prime Video and available to rent elsewhere

1. La Chimera

Dir. Alice Rohrwacher

Alice Rohrwacher’s latest is part crime caper, part modern take on Orpheus and Eurydice. Josh O’Connor (never looking better than in rumpled linen suits) gives a career-best performance as Arthur, a man grieving an unclear past heartbreak while he and his tombaroli friends plunder ancient Etruscan gravesites and sell the bounty. Just as Arthur is trapped in his own past and the allure of the treasures of his adopted country, the sun-dappled milieu of 1980s Italy feels decades older through Rohrwacher’s lens. Millennia of art, loves, and losses have shaped and continue to shape landscapes and people – even those, like Arthur, who just pass through. [Carmen Paddock]

La Chimera is streaming on MUBI and available to rent elsewhere

---

For more on our Films of 2024, listen to the latest episode of The Cineskinny podcast in the player below, or wherever you get your podcasts...