Top 10 Best Movies of 2024

From sweary superheroes to an emotionally-charged game of tennis, 2024 has given us some of the best movies of recent years. Here are the 2024 films you should add to your watchlist right now.

Top 10 Best Movies of 2024

There have been some big movies in 2024, for sure. For starters, Marvel unleashed all of its gore and swearing in one go with Deadpool & Wolverine, while Denis Villeneuve took us back to Arrakis for another majestic sci-fi epic in Dune: Part Two. The year ended, meanwhile, with the whizz-bang musical triple bill of Wicked, Moana 2, and Mufasa: The Lion King.

With so many movies to choose from, you'll need a guide through those enormous streaming catalogues. Thankfully for you, we've got you covered. This December, we polled the Voice staff team and our Voice Contributors, as well as the wider Voice Community. We've crunched the numbers and these are officially the Voice picks for the best movie of 2024. Democracy in action!


10=. Despicable Me 4, Moana 2, and Paddington in Peru

It's a trio of family movie sequels tying for our number 10 spot. The minions returned for the sixth instalment in their banana-coloured franchise of slapstick for Despicable Me 4. Elsewhere, we sailed back to the Pacific Islands for more song-and-dance with animated Disney musical Moana 2, while we travelled to the dark depths of the Amazon rainforest for cutesy adventure storytelling in Paddington in Peru.

It was a great year for family cinema, for sure, and there's more to come on that front further up this list. If you're looking for 2024 films to catch up on over Christmas, you could do a lot worse than taking the entire family to see one of these three.


8=. La Chimera

When he wasn't sweating his way through Challengers — more on that later — Josh O'Connor showed us his talents also stretch to speaking Italian with his performance in La Chimera. Alice Rohrwacher never makes ordinary movies and this tale of a Brit leading a gang of Tuscan tomb thieves in 1980s Italy is certainly anything but ordinary.

Our charity's director Diana Walton chose the film as her best of the year, describing it as a "wonderful story". She wrote that the movie is "funny, authentic, and comes with a touch of magical realism".


8=. Dune: Part Two

Denis Villeneuve has now done what David Lynch couldn't in the 1980s. He has transformed the dense sci-fi world of Frank Herbert's Dune series into a satisfying big screen experience. This sequel furthered the spectacle and majesty of the first movie, while deepening Timothée Chalamet's portrayal of the complex protagonist Paul Atreides. We got massive sand worms, complex politics, and a completely bald Austin Butler grimacing his way through a series of knife fights. That, it has to be said, is pure cinema. 

Voice Managing Editor Tom Inniss certainly thinks so, choosing the movie as his favourite of the year. He said: "An absolute masterclass in cinematography, sound design, and adapting a very dense, dry book to be exquisite viewing. Casting was superb, visuals a total delight, and it perfectly caps off the work started in part one."


6=. The Wild Robot

Who'd have thought that the story of a talking robot and their bond with the animals roaming a forest wilderness would be one of the most emotional films of 2024? Helped by the tremendous work of Lupita Nyong'o in the voiceover booth, this animation based on a children's book is a joyous exercise in life-affirming beauty.

The animation style eschews the photorealism beloved of the biggest studios in favour of something totally different: a dreamlike watercolour aesthetic. Every frame of this movie is completely beautiful, even before the tears start flowing. And flow, they will.


6=. Deadpool & Wolverine 

After years of avoiding anything approaching adult material, Marvel let the F-bomb floodgates open along with a torrent of blood like the lift in The Shining. Deadpool & Wolverine brought Ryan Reynolds and his self-referential, sweary shtick into the MCU along with the return of Hugh Jackman's knife-fingered Wolverine.

The film included a whole lot of multiversal shenanigans and cameos from fan favourites, but it really flew to more than $1bn at the box office on the back of Reynolds and Jackman's killer comedy chemistry. A repeated joke in the movie suggested that Jackman would be doing this until he's 90 years old. We wouldn't bet against it.


5. Inside Out 2

How could Pixar follow up one of its best ever movies? There was a healthy scepticism around Inside Out 2, but that was swiftly battered away when we saw the movie. With Riley now a teenager, the film explored her shifting emotions say hello to Anxiety and her difficult dilemmas around the idea of friendship.

It's absolute proof, if we ever needed it, that nobody should ever write off Pixar. When the going gets tough, they have a habit of producing something genius. Inside Out 2 stands as the highest-grossing movie of 2024, as well as being one of the year's finest works.


4. Challengers

Yes, that one hotel room scene got memed into infamy, but Luca Guadagnino's sweaty tale of tennis and romance was about much more than that. It was a complex tale of emotional and professional dynamics between Zendaya's injured former tennis prodigy and the two lovestruck lads she met on the amateur circuit years earlier, played by Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor.

The direction and cinematography is utterly unique, transforming tennis into a physical and mental ballet of tension, helped by a tremendous score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Voice Contributor Elisha Pearce chose it as her film of the year, writing: "It gets better with every rewatch. Builds tension so well, soundtrack, pacing and cinematography are all 10/10."


3. The Substance

It's true that Coralie Fargeat's The Substance isn't intended for those without a certain amount of stomach strength. This is body horror in every sense of the name, telling the story of Demi Moore's ageing star and her use of an underground drug treatment to share life with a younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. Naturally, this goes wrong very quickly. The Substance never goes in the direction you expect, marrying its potent story about Hollywood beauty standards with some truly ludicrous gore. 

Voice Editor Tom Beasley chose the film as the best of the year, writing: "Coralie Fargeat's intense body horror movie is as grotesque as it is perceptive, taking on the misogynistic standards imposed on women, and doing so in a carnival explosion of blood." Becki Douglass, one of the Voice Contributors, also had it at number one. She said: "The cinematography and story was incredible."


2. Poor Things

The UK started the year off strong with Yorgos Lanthimos's deeply bizarre comedy Poor Things. Emma Stone portrays a woman who has had her own unborn child's brain implanted in her recently deceased adult body. Make sense of that if you can. The movie follows the woman, Bella, on a bizarre adventure around the world with an exploitative cad played by Mark Ruffalo.

Stone won Best Actress at the Oscars for her exceptional and bold performance, while the film has definitely made an impact on everybody who has seen it. 


1. Wicked

Jon M Chu took on a mammoth task when he decided to adapt the blockbuster Broadway and West End musical about the witches of Oz. He raised even more eyebrows when he opted to split the story into two films, with the first one alone running for longer than the entire stage show. Thankfully, with Cynthia Erivo's incredible pipes fuelling Elphaba and Ariana Grande bringing surprisingly astute comedy to her frenemy Glinda, all of our worries proved unfounded.

We wept at Defying Gravity, grooved in our seat throughout Dancing Through Life, and tried really hard not to join in with The Wizard and I. The year's worth of waiting for the sequel now feels like an agonising time away from Oz.

For more on the best film of 2024, read our Wicked reviews by Faron Spence-Small and Naomi Johnson. Voting the film number one on her list, Naomi said: "I absolutely love musicals, and I thoroughly enjoyed the lengthened plot of the film, with a high level of comedy throughout." Voice Contributor Brogan Flowers also crowned it number one, writing that she "loved the music".


What do you think of our list? Are there any big movies we should have included, and did we love any of the more than we should have done? Check out more of our 2024 Top 10s and, if you're interested in the film business, you can learn more about screen acting courtesy of Trinity College London.

Author

Voice Magazine

Voice Magazine

Voice is a magazine and platform for young creatives covering arts, culture, politics and technology. This account contains anonymous posts, information regarding the website and our events.

Recent posts by this author

View more posts by Voice Magazine

0 Comments

Post A Comment

You must be signed in to post a comment. Click here to sign in now

You might also like

Interview: Alex from BBC's The Traitors

Interview: Alex from BBC's The Traitors

by Naomi Johnson

Read now