Chin-stroking pieces on the role of art in politically perilous times have long been a perennial feature of American cultural criticism, but particularly so in the past decade. Now that the nation is looking down the barrel of (at least) another four years of kleptocratic authoritarianism under the rubbery mask of cultural revanchism, there is a particular urgency to the question: What the fuck are we doing here? Well, we’re talking about movies, of course, struggling as always to find some gleaming treasure amid the dross of a populist medium dominated (financially if not culturally) by risk-averse conservatism and a general contempt for its audience. If there’s an extra sense of tetchy exhaustion that attends our endeavors at the end of anno Domini 2024, it’s because we are very, very tired of living through interesting times. Like Pansy, the vituperative anti-heroine of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, we just want it all to stop.
However, even (or perhaps especially) in the worst of times, great films possess a durable ability to break the hypnotic spell of our dumpster-fire reality. They dislodge us from the tunnel vision of our own lives (for a time), employing mere light and sound to create affecting emotions, empathetic insights, and stimulating disruptions. Don’t call it escapism: Name it the ineffable pleasure of humanity’s most intricate and unforgiving medium. Also, if you don’t laugh when a guy in a beaver costume falls down, do you even have a soul?
It’s been a robust year for cinema, all things considered, although perhaps more critically contentious than most. Some titles that made a splash elsewhere were entirely absent from the conversation as we editors assembled our collaborative list. (Sorry not sorry, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, and Saturday Night.) There were a handful of commonalities that popped up in our individual lists, but less overlap than in prior years, suggesting a divergence in the kinds of films we independently gravitated toward this year. (Or just an increase in haterism, which is always a possibility here.) As always, we don’t do rankings at The Take-Up. Instead, we have prepared a curated list of 30 films that we loved, arranged alphabetically, plus plenty of honorable mentions for good measure. Links to contributor reviews and places to catch these cinematic gems are also provided.
Honorable Mentions: Adam Sandler: Love You, America, Art College 1994, Caught by the Tides, Cloud, Coma, The Deliverance, Dune: Part Two, Eephus, Eureka, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, The First Omen, Handling the Undead, Here (the other one), His Three Daughters, How to Have Sex, Janet Planet, Kinds of Kindness, The Last Showgirl, Megalopolis, Monkey Man, The Mother of All Lies, Nocturnes, The People’s Joker, A Real Pain, Ren Faire, The Room Next Door, Rumours, The Settlers, Skin Deep, Under the Fig Trees, Wicked
Anora
The most wildly entertaining feature to date from director Sean Baker – now two decades into his hopeless, love-hate situationship with the curdled American Dream – Anora executes a tripartite magic trick. An opening act that pulses with the delirious fantasy of an R-rated Disney-princess tale inevitably collapses into a ticking-clock, after-hours farce about the unraveling of that same fantasy. Then the film shifts yet again, as Baker’s well-honed facility for messy humanism takes center stage in a defeated, wintery coda with more sexual and emotional tension than a hundred prestige dramas. As exhilarating as Anora’s lifestyle-porn glitz and absurdist comedy might be, it’s that final movement that lingers – along with Mikey Madison’s heroic pronunciation of “A FRAWD MARRIAGE?!!” (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to rent or purchase on major online platforms.]
The Beast
“What year is this?” It’s a question that’s floated around in the heads of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) fans since the movie/miniseries (movieseries?) left their jaws on the floor. If you dialed into its wavelength and it resonated with you, you’ve surely been searching for something to replicate the emotion of that finale. Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is one of two films from 2024 that comes close to that beguiling, horrifying feeling. (We’ll get to you shortly, I Saw the TV Glow). Based on Henry James’s 1903 novella, The Beast in the Jungle, Bonello toys with genre and time to craft what can only be described as the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas by way of David Lynch with a touch of David Cronenberg’s 2012-22 output thrown in. These echoes are an assist, not a hindrance: Bonello’s operating on a plane entirely of his own here. The cinema of 2024 saw nothing else like it. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on the Criterion Channel.]
The Brutalist
After three features, the world finally seems to be catching up to the eccentric, uncompromising vision of filmmaker Brady Corbet. Yet it’s striking that The Brutalist – a novelistic, three-and-a-half-hour drama about an obsessive immigrant architect slamming headlong into the limits of American exceptionalism – has been the film to place him at director roundtables alongside the likes of Guadagnino and Villeneuve. An old-school, decades-spanning epic complete with overture and intermission, The Brutalist is a truly monumental work, but it hums with a peculiar, riveting energy that matches the cutting-edge artistry of its protagonist’s haunted imagination. Adeptly blending fact, myth, and raw sensation, Corbet’s feature has the uncommon self-assurance of an original work that arrives with full awareness of its greatness. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now playing in select theaters.]
Challengers
Like a tennis ball launched over the fence and sent bouncing through the parking lot of your local rec center, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers came out of nowhere and made a sizable dent in the minivan that was 2024 in film. Does that track? Speaking of tracking, that’s exactly what cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s camera did: bouncing around the court from racket to racket, gandering at players up, down, around, up close, and afar with an energy that just didn’t quit. Following a relatively well-trodden path and featuring a trio of characters that could have very easily been uninteresting (if not outright unbearable) in the wrong hands, it’s kind of a miracle Challengers is any good in the first place. It’s all the more impressive, then, that — thanks to the stars that aligned for Guadagnino and crew — it stands near the top of last year’s heap. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on Prime Video and to rent or purchase on other major online platforms.]
Close Your Eyes
Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes is as meditative as it is monumental, an opus that grapples with the conundrum that haunts every auteur: Why devote decades to nurturing an art form that doesn’t love you back? Erice might not have a clear answer, but it’s every bit as deliberate and self-reflective as any Late Era obsessive could hope to receive from a master in his 80s. To these aging greats, film is a haunted house, the dead and the gone destined to cycle through the motions, given new life only by the grace of repeated viewings. The title itself is a call to action, commanding us to sit and consider the things left unspoken, the places in the mind left unexplored. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to rent or purchase on major online platforms.]
Dahomey
Mati Diop’s boundary-pushing, genre-defying Dahomey tracks the journey of 26 West African relics from a Paris museum to their original home in Benin, complete with a magical-realist slant used to spur a deeper discussion about art, culture, and colonization. It’s a uniquely engaging geo-socio-political-economic study that’s as sharp as it sounds, packing an entire course load of theory and debate into a lightning-fast sub-70-minute package. “Within me resonates infinity,” the voices of the crates say — fitting, considering the vast depths and limitless conversations that sprout from this singular, thought-provoking piece of experimental documentary filmmaking. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on MUBI.]
A Different Man
Initially, it’s hard to know what to make of Aaron Schimberg’s droll, morbid, and defiantly unclassifiable feature, in which an aspiring actor afflicted with facial deformities is miraculously cured and quickly gets (seemingly) everything he wants in life. Notwithstanding its scruffy, New York indie vibes, however, A Different Man is playing four-dimensional chess, laying fertile groundwork for a psychologically incisive yet emotionally raw study of self-loathing, petty resentment, and the perils of first-impression assumptions. One almost feels guilty for gleefully watching Sebastian Stan come apart at the seams as the universe puts his character through a wringer of comeuppance worthy of the ancient Greek playwrights (or an Old Testament Jehovah). Almost. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to rent or purchase on major online platforms.]
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
Who knew that when the dystopia arrived, it would be so boring? Or involve so much traffic? No film of 2024 captured the banal horrors of our present moment quite like Radu Jude’s masterful, darkly hilarious feature, which could easily nick a subtitle from the cultural theorist Mark Fisher: Is There No Alternative? Low-level production assistant Angela – a slippery and riveting Ilinca Manolache –spends her days navigating the wilderness of the tedious, late-capitalist nightmare that is modern existence. Were we born to live this way, schlepping through tasks that we despise and venting our frustrations through ironic TikTok personas? Probably not, but it sure is funny, in a if-I-don’t-laugh-about-this-I-won’t-be-able-to-stop-crying kind of way. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on MUBI.]
Evil Does Not Exist
aka A Walk in the Woods. The great Ryusuke Hamaguchi shifts gears from the personal to the ecological, swapping a trauma in the rearview mirror for a catastrophe we’re all blindly rushing toward. Never mind that the mountain village of Mizubiki looks like the most serene and inviting place on Earth through his lens, especially in winter – something godawful is approaching, seeping up from the earth like sludge. Hamaguchi might ground this gnawing, deliberate tale in mundanities like woodchopping and local civic governance, but his canvas is vast, almost cosmic. Everyone is guilty, yet no one is responsible, and the world slides ever deeper into madness. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on the Criterion Channel.]
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Never one to rest on his laurels, seasoned cinematic madman George Miller follows up the nitro-hot perfection of Mad Max: Fury Road with his post-apocalyptic riff on both The Iliad and The Odyssey. (There’s also some Paradise Lost in there.) A true five-part epic – that “Saga” in the subtitle isn’t just franchise pretension – Miller’s latest wrestles with subjects like loss, hope, and vengeance that have bedeviled humanity throughout history, pre- and post-Collapse. The guzzaline-fueled action is peerless, of course, but the most shocking thing about Furiosa might be that its roaring vehicular thrills are almost secondary to the timeless ideas it conveys through its operatic wasteland mythology of Pissboys and Octobosses. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on Max and Netflix, and to rent or purchase on other major online platforms.]
Goodrich
Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s Home Again (2017) was nice enough, serving as a solid — if familiar — filmmaking debut for the daughter of writer-directors Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, but it wasn’t until her follow-up, Goodrich, that she was able to truly prove that the path she’s on is uniquely her own. As with any child of a creative, comparisons to her parents’ work were an inevitability (and, in Home Again’s case, completely warranted, given how close it hews to the Meyers-Shyer oeuvre). For her second feature, Hallie smartly distances herself from anything Nancy or Charles have ever done, allowing Goodrich the space to be a distinct and deeply felt father-daughter drama that impresses not because of the famous family it descended from but in spite of it. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to rent or purchase on major online platforms.]
Hard Truths
Mike Leigh returns to contemporary Britain with a vexing character study for the ages, imagining a woman so wracked with anxieties, ailments, and unresolved baggage that she makes the whole world her enemy. Reuniting with Secrets & Lies MVP Marianne Jean-Baptiste – who delivers a barnburner of a performance as a character whose malice continually veers between absurd and tragic – the veteran filmmaker is less interested in answering the whys of human behavior than observing said behavior with earnest curiosity and empathy. Hard Truths might be the most focused and ferociously unsentimental expression of this impulse in his career, as well as a reminder no one does English-language social realism better than Leigh. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now playing in select theaters.]
Here
Bas Devos’ latest, Here, is a serene little reverie of a film — microscopically so. It follows Stefan (Stefan Gota), a construction worker preparing to move home, and Shuxiu (Liyo Gong), a doctoral candidate studying mosses in the Belgian woods, building up to and following through on their meet-cute one idyllic afternoon. Shot on 16mm and showcasing all the gorgeous deep greens and glowing yellows of the forest, the film presents dank foliage and warm sunbeams that seem actually tangible — an experience to be felt through the screen and in the chest. (Imagine a bizarro world where this packed all those 4DX theaters nationwide instead of last summer’s Twisters.) (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on the Criterion Channel.]
Hundreds of Beavers
No indie success story of 2024 quite matched the deliciously anarchic, full-body commitment of Mike Cheslik’s quasi-silent slapstick comedy, which pits an applejack salesman-turned-trapper against the titular horde of rodents in the snowbound wilderness of 19th-century North America. Built on a robust foundation of shrewd visual storytelling and drawing from a legion of artistic influences too numerous to namecheck in their entirety – from Buster Keaton to Guy Maddin to Donkey Kong Country – Cheslik and his collaborators have crafted the year’s exemplar of cinema as a delivery system for pure delight. Between the Looney Tunes violence, Monty Python homages, and never-old running visual gags, one can be forgiven for missing the Orson Welles allusions. It’s OK: That’s what compulsive rewatches are for. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on Prime Video and to rent or purchase on other major online platforms.]
I Saw the TV Glow
Paradoxically, it’s both fair and unfair to call Jane Schoenbrun a horror filmmaker. The H-word comes with a particular set of expectations that couldn’t be further from what they’re interested in doing but are nevertheless ingrained in their filmic worlds. Like their debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow feels utterly haunted. Like watching something that’s not supposed to be watched. Like its characters are in a very real, very inhuman danger. And yet … it’s not at home alongside other horror entries from 2024. This conspicuousness is the thing that makes TV Glow such an impressive, subversive embrace of its influences. It’s a look back and a look forward in one unforgettable picture. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on Max and to rent or purchase on other major online platforms.]
In Our Day
For his 30th film, Hong Sang-soo gave us a two-hander starring a couple of his greatest and most beloved collaborators: Ki Joobong, playing aging (and newly diet-restricted) Uiji, and Kim Min-hee as Sangwon, an actress in midlife crisis. Although In Our Day never sees the two meet onscreen, they are intrinsically and subtextually linked — and not just by their shared existential turmoil. This dual-pronged thing is nothing new for Hong: It’s a classic structure he’s used numerous times throughout the years, and that makes its usage here feel like a return to form of sorts. (Setting aside that this filmmaker never stops toying with form and, therefore, has no real form to return to.) It’s pure, life-affirming comfort food.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to rent or purchase on major online platforms.]
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
In a year packed with auspicious feature debuts, no film quite had the spellbinding impact of Phạm Thiên Ân’s languid three-hour epic, in which a Vietnamese man’s rambling search for his missing brother attains the liquid character of a hypnagogic odyssey. Weaving together Catholic symbolism, fine-art references, and the still-raw wounds of colonial and Communist history, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell proves a mesmerizing experience, its images as intoxicating as they are mysterious. Is it too early to declare Ân an emergent luminary of the East Asian slow-cinema tradition on par with Tsai Ming-liang or Apichatpong Weerasethakul? Maybe. However, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell speaks for itself, embodying all the strange and wonderful potential of the medium in our increasingly coarse times. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to rent or purchase on major online platforms.]
Juror #2
There’s a certain attitude of “I’ll believe it when I see it” when it comes to new projects from nonagenarian American masters. It’s not that there was any doubt that Clint Eastwood was up for a directing gig at 93. No, studio hurdles are squarely to blame for any speculation about whether a film like Juror #2 could ever see the light of day in 2024. (The 92-year-old Elaine May needs a shadow director before she can shoot her long-gestating latest; Guillermo Del Toro had to remain on standby for 87-year-old William Friedkin to shoot his courtroom drama, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, in 2023.) And yet, against all odds (but to no one’s real surprise), Eastwood pulled it off — and all by himself to boot. Beyond the amazing fact that it even exists, Juror #2 is a sharp and surprising legal thriller in its own right, one that distorts and upends its traditional beats to do what often feels undoable on the Hollywood studio level: say something fresh. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on Max and to rent or purchase on other major online platforms.]
Last Summer
Leave it to veteran provocateur like Catherine Breillat to take a Pornhub search prompt like “stepmother-stepson affair” and transform it into one of the most intelligent, compelling, and seamlessly constructed features of her career. Reworking a five-year-old Danish feature in her inimitable, psychologically thorny way – and anchored by a deliciously confounding performance from Léa Drucker – Breillat’s film transcends (but never forgets) its fundamentally icky premise. Last Summer isn’t not a film about the durable allure of sexual taboos, but it’s also much more. Breillat delivers a searing yet ambiguous portrait of a woman whose addictions feel less like erotic perversity than a gambler’s high, a reason-defying capitulation to the thrill of playing with matches in the gasoline-drenched room that is her perfect, bourgeois life. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on the Criterion Channel and to rent or purchase on other major online platforms.]
Longlegs
Admittedly, the components of Osgood Perkins’ latest chiller – a wary female FBI agent, an occult-fixated serial killer, and a ghastly trail of ritual murders – are familiar stuff. How then does one explain the haunting power of Longlegs, which lingers like greasy black smoke curling up from the pit of Hell itself? It rests on Perkins’ singular, dizzying talent for evoking a disturbing alternate reality, one where “The Man Downstairs” walks unhindered through our fallen world. His handiwork can be found everywhere: in the cracked-mirror visions of a devil-worshipping pedophile, to be sure, but also in the too-tight embrace of a loving parent – or under the bright wrapping paper of a little girl’s birthday presents. Longlegs presses the viewer’s nose against a queasily off-center picture, one in which the world’s moral order has been turned both inside-out and upside-down. Hail Satan, indeed. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to rent or purchase on major online platforms.]
Love Lies Bleeding
“Be Gay. Do Crimes.” So say the memes, but into these Love Lies Bleeding injects a middle step: Get Big. Dramatically shifting genres and tones from her incendiary feature debut, Saint Maud, British filmmaker Rose Glass ventures into the dusty, sticky world of American neo-noir, with spectacular results. A thick, veiny, and unabashedly horny slice of criminal misadventure, Glass’ feature grabs the viewer’s attention with its gritty yet maximalist visual style and grotesque flourishes of magical realism. Yet what truly lingers about Love Lies Bleeding is how it queers genre tropes while simultaneously playing them straight. Nothing powers a cold-plated revenge story quite like a dame with a killer body, after all. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on Max and to rent or purchase on other major online platforms.]
Nickel Boys
While Netflix is encouraging writers to spell out actions in dialogue so viewers can more comfortably half-watch, it feels revolutionary to see a director still committed to showing instead of telling. RaMell Ross’ time as a documentarian has something to do with it, no doubt: His narrative debut, based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys, tells its gut-wrenching story via an observational first-person technique so radically different from its contemporaries that it might as well be called brand new. Fueled by emotional performances from Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, with a vital supporting part from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Ross’s big, experimental swing makes contact in a most powerful way. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now playing in select theaters.]
Nosferatu
There was no serious doubt that Robert Eggers’ reimagining of F.W. Murnau’s groundbreaking 1922 riff on Dracula would prove to be an appropriately lush, exacting work of Victorian Gothic extravagance. Indeed, the director’s new version of Nosferatu is everything that genre fans have come to expect from one of America’s most sober and meticulous cinematic artists. What’s surprising about Eggers’ fourth narrative feature is how fresh this story feels once exhumed from a century-plus layer of grave dust and ironic detachment. Invigorating the material through dense atmosphere, striking design choices, and pointed psychological insight (remarkably sans anachronism), Eggers lends his Nosferatu the sickly-sweet aroma of a blooming corpse flower. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now playing in select theaters.]
Pictures of Ghosts
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s wistful and yet ultimately unsentimental portrait of his native city of Recife, Brazil emerged as an early contender for the most unexpectedly poignant documentary of the year. Wandering outward from the enchanted sanctuary of his mother’s downtown apartment – like an idle adolescent rambling through bustling streets on a sweltering equatorial night – Filho’s feature revisits the place that made him, focusing its attention on the city’s vibrant culture of cinephilia. Like all great memory-palace movies, Pictures of Ghosts balances a keen melancholy for what has been lost with a hard-won appreciation for the intangibles that have resisted time’s ravages. The film proves to be an exquisite articulation of one of experience’s harshest adages: You can’t go home again. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now streaming on the Criterion Channel.]
Queer
It typically takes a Spielberg or a Soderbergh to direct two radically different yet exceptionally made films in a single calendar year. With Queer, Luca Guadagnino proves he can work just as efficiently — and without so much as a hint of fatigue on screen, either. Daniel Craig is unreal here as William Lee (William S. Burroughs, essentially), a perfect guide to navigate the surreal miniatures and trippy zone-outs that give the whole feature a spacy, dream-like feel. Reuniting the filmmaker with Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and editor Marco Costa, plus composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the film truly is a two-for-two situation: Queer serves as the aching, moody older sibling to Challengers’ high-energy psychological thrills, precisely the type of B-side only Guadagnino could pull off. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now playing in select theaters.]
Spermworld
There’s plenty to be said (and just as much that has already been said) about the current state of blockbuster filmmaking in the United States. But what about the shape of American documentary filmmaking today? Far too many treat the practice like an extension of the evening news, spelling it all out for the viewer with overly expository title cards, insipid voiceover narration, and gratuitous self-inserts from the director — see practically any of the overlong doc series released on your streaming service of choice. Too few take advantage of just how boundless the art form of documentary truly is. One name that you can count on to deliver, however? Lance Oppenheim. His debut, Some Kind of Heaven (2020), established him as a groundbreaking up-and-comer to watch, but it’s his riveting and unusual sophomore doc, Spermworld, that cemented him as one of the most distinctive in the field, bar none. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on Hulu.]
The Substance
Blowing the door off art-horror’s ultra-restraint era with a blast of pelvic sweat, pink-glitter eyeshadow, and sepsis-tainted plasma, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance asks, “Why dial it up to 11, when you can just break the knob?” Maximalism might be the new black – or maybe it’s just that everything old is new again – but the addictive appeal of Fargeat’s anti-realist style goes beyond the superficial sensory pleasures of a neo-exploitation flick that smears together tits, gore, and appallingly squelchy sound design. The filmmaker and her collaborators deliver a rich, captivating work of kinetic cinema, one where the obviousness of the metaphor is the Whole Point, as they say. We’re rattling around in the skull of a doomed woman who is simultaneously a pitiable victim, self-loathing accomplice, and grasping villain: There’s no time for nuance. (Andrew Wyatt) [Now available to stream on MUBI and to rent or purchase on other major online platforms.]
Trap
Those cineastes who appreciate M. Night Shyamalan’s brand of moviemaking are waiting patiently for the rest of the world to drop the Reddit-brained, CinemaSins-style snark and embrace his rightful designation as contemporary American cinema’s very own Alfred Hitchcock — winking director cameos and all. In the meantime, the admirably unbothered modern master of suspense continues to crank out some of the most enjoyable, completely singular experiences the multiplex has to offer. Unlike the beach that makes you old, there’s an easy way off the M. Night-bashing bandwagon: Drop the act, forgive the guy for taking a for-hire gig that disappointed you 15 years ago, and throw on Trap — for this critic’s money, the most fun-per-minute at the movie theater last year. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on Max and to rent or purchase on other major online platforms.]
A Traveler's Needs
Hong Sang-soo and Isabelle Huppert have made movie magic twice before, so is it all that surprising when they do it again? Despite what critics might say about Hong’s style, he’s not one to walk the same path a second time (much less a third). Even if the trail winds and weaves over familiar turf a moment or two along the way, Hong’s endlessly refreshing, ever-spontaneous creative process still manages to consistently surprise even his most loyal viewer. A Traveler’s Needs departs from the Hong-Huppert efforts that precede it, showing audiences yet another new side of a filmmaker and a star with an endless number of facets to explore. (Kayla McCulloch) [Now playing in select theaters.]
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
As a continuation of a 35-year-old property, Vengeance Most Fowl technically qualifies as a product of the same IP dredging that brought 2024 audiences such uninspired works as Disney’s Inside Out 2, Moana 2, and Mufasa: The Lion King and Universal’s Kung-Fu Panda 4 and Despicable Me 4. But, when viewed alongside these sequels (or, in the latter studio’s case, sequels to sequels’ sequels), the difference in artistic merit is stark. As if the spectacular quality of co-director Nick Park’s early Wallace & Gromit shorts (1989-2008) weren’t convincing enough — not to mention the way Park and co-director Steve Box already proved that the stop-motion pair could successfully be stretched to triple their usual runtime with modern Halloween classic Curse of the Were-Rabbit — Vengeance Most Fowl arrives just under the wire as the greatest animated film of 2024. (And — why not? — for those watching on Netflix, a contender for 2025, too.) (Kayla McCulloch) [Now available to stream on Netflix.]
