It’s often said that December for film critics is like tax season for accountants. This is our crucial time as we try to take stock of the films of the last 12 months and individually and collectively identify our favorites.

Earlier this month, the New York Film Critics Circle presented its Best Picture award The brutalistBrady Corbet’s stirring drama about a Hungarian-born architect’s postwar American revival. A few days later, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, of which I am a member, awarded its top prize AnoraSean Baker’s wildly entertaining farce about a Brooklyn sex worker.

It says something about the quality of films this year, as much as I like it Anora And The brutalistBoth titles landed just outside my personal favorites list. So here are the 10 – no, 11 – best films of 2024.

Close your eyes

It has been more than 50 years since the legendary Víctor Erice made one of the greatest of all Spanish films. The spirit of the hive (1973). Since then, he has directed only three feature films, the last of which came after an absence from the director’s chair that lasted about three decades.

Both elegiac and quietly delighted, Close your eyes begins as a kind of cinephile detective story with a hint of meta: the protagonist (played by Manolo Solo) is himself a long-retired filmmaker trying to solve the mystery of an old friend and former actor who disappeared years earlier. Through its transcendent final scenes, this riveting drama movingly affirmed the power of love, the inevitability of loss, and the comforting joys of losing yourself in cinema.

Don’t expect too much from the end of the world And Evil doesn’t exist

In Don’t expect too much from the end of the worldIn , an invigoratingly foul-mouthed black comedy from Romanian director Radu Jude, the astonishing Ilinca Manolache plays a production assistant who works horrendous hours on a corporate video promoting workplace safety. In Evil doesn’t exista quietly haunting drama by Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive my car), a planned glamping site endangers the environmental peace of a wooded Japanese city. The consequences of unchecked corporate greed are obvious and terrible. This also applies to the killer instincts of two of today’s best and most original filmmakers.

Nickel Boys And Another man

These are two of the boldest and most imaginative American films of the year, both of which ingeniously upend our usual notions of empathy and identification. In his gripping 2019 adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel Nickel BoysWriter-director RaMell Ross uses a first-person camera to put us in the heads of his protagonists, two black boys who endure juvenile detention in Jim Crow-era Florida. In Aaron Schimberg’s fidgeting originality and provocation Another manSebastian Stan plays a “facially unique” New Yorker who is given the miraculous chance to slip into someone else’s shoes – only to find that he still can’t escape his own.

La Chimera And Music

Two enchanting, achingly romantic dramas bring an invigorating touch to ancient myths. Josh O’Connor plays a smarmy, charismatic modern-day Orpheus in Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s film La Chimeraa story about lost graves and grave robbers that might as well have had a title Plunder the Tuscan Sun. Meanwhile with Music, German director Angela Schanelec weaves an enigmatic puzzle rooted in the story of Oedipus Rex – a tragedy that loses almost all of its narrative foundations but none of its harrowing power in this sui generis tale.

No other country And Green border

Two gripping films – a non-fiction book, a feature film – are unwaveringly dedicated to horror. The documentary still doesn’t have a U.S. distributor, despite winning numerous festival and critics awards for 2024 No other country is the work of four filmmakers – two Palestinians and two Israelis – who bravely documented the Israeli government’s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank. The extremely shocking drama Green border“The film” by Polish director Agnieszka Holland takes us into the chaos on the Polish-Belarusian border, where refugees, soldiers and human rights activists find themselves in an agonizing geopolitical limbo.

Everything we imagine as light And Hard truths

Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia won the Cannes Grand Prix for Everything we imagine as lighta quietly shimmering drama about three women from Mumbai, all of whom defy gender expectations in their own way. Veteran English filmmaker Mike Leigh is no less concerned with the bonds between women and just as rigorous in his pursuit of realism. He gave us a drama reduced to the essentials Hard truthswith Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin (both graduates of his 1996 triumph, Secrets and lies) in two of the best performances of the year.