The Best Movies of 2024: From the Erotically Charged “Challengers” to the Roaringly Wild “Furiosa”

PEOPLE's critic, Tom Gliatto, selects his top 10 films from 2024

We've just enjoyed one of the best movie years in a long time, wouldn't you say? Spread wide across the genre landscape, many of 2024's were so good, so vital and so wholly realized, they'll be remembered and revisited long after.

You had Netflix's flamboyant Mexican musical Emilia Pérez, Jesse Eisenberg's somber, small-scale comedy A Real Pain, and the rampaging action-fantasy Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Can you imagine sharing an Uber with them as your fellow passengers? Your route home might be complicated, but you'd arrive happy at the end, and you might be inclined to give the driver five stars.

Related: The Best TV of 2024: From a Sterling Shōgun to the Tear-Tugging One Day

I decided on Challengers as my top choice, as you can see, but the impeccably smooth Conclave and the spiky, unpredictable Anora could just as easily have won out. Challengers prevailed, in a sense, by having both the polish of the former and the daring of the latter. It may also be the case that Challengers made me want to be Zendaya.

By the way, you won't find Wicked on this hallowed list. The movie is certainly a phenomenon that's made millions of people happy — audiences sing along with it! — and Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are both first-rate as the future Wicked and Good Witches. But it's a middling musical that failed to make me want to go along for a deep dive into the witches' backstory. The Wizard of Oz was about going over the rainbow. Wicked basically goes under it.

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1: Challengers

Tennis, anyone? Everyone? In director Luca Guadagnino’s sexually sizzling film, the zipping ping and pong of a fuzzy yellow ball back and forth across a net builds to an almost orgasmic frenzy. Zendaya plays a onetime tennis prodigy who now manages her husband, a stalled star player (Mike Faist). To restore his mojo, she maneuvers him into a match against his former best friend, now rival (Josh O'Connor). But she may have her own spin — as Guadagnino slowly reveals, she alone understands that they’re all in love with one another. It’s just that their emotions play out on court.

This may frustrate people who want the film to be, in effect, a kind of three-wheeled rom-com, only perhaps more progressively unorthodox than Pretty Woman. But Challengers taps into something richer that's also spectacularly messy. It's about the fluidity of attraction — the desire to smudge those chalk lines. The film at times has the encompassing pansexuality of a D.H. Lawrence novel (Women in Love, say, which was adapted into a rather startling film back in 1969) but with everyone wearing immaculate shorts and tennies. The movie is a dizzying original — an erotic workout.

It's also much more successful than Guadagnino's other 2024 film, Queer, which is focused solely on the thwarted gay passions of an American expat in 1950s Mexico. Former 007 Daniel Craig is excellent in the role, but the movie eventually wanders far off into the jungle as he searches for hallucinogenic drugs. Leslie Manville, looking as if she'd spent the last decade in a mud bath, supervises Craig's surreal, CGI-enhanced trips into the sexual unconscious. The film isn't so much sizzling as sozzled and sticky.

Challengers is now streaming on Prime Video and MGM+.

2: Conclave

The most satisfying entertainment of the year stars Ralph Fiennes as a beleaguered cardinal overseeing a papal election. Although the movie is more slick and suspenseful than spiritual, Fiennes, in a performance that depends on the intricate interplay of his worried eyes and tense, purse-lipped mouth, gives a performance that feels like a genuine dark night of the soul. You might very well come out thinking that a few hours of shallow fun is more up your line — but that pretty much defines Conclave. The supporting cast includes John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini as a nun who's as unintimidatable as the warden of a women's prison. That, too, is a job that probably requires its own special calling.

Conclave is streaming on Peacock Dec. 13.

3: Anora

Many years ago a well-known film critic, reviewing Diane Keaton's performance in the largely forgotten Looking for Mr. Goodbar, wrote, "If she doesn't win the Oscar, there is no God!" I feel the same way about Mikey Madison's breakthrough performance in this comedy-drama about a Manhattan sex worker, Anora, who meets the boy-man of her dreams. Played by Mark Eydelshteyn, he's the mindless, affable son of Russian gangsters and lives in a large, charmless house on Long Island, where he installs Anora as his princess — and bride — and goes back to playing video games.

Is Anora in love with him or these luxe suburban trappings? Madison's performance is both too tough and too vulnerable to let you decide one way or the other. But then the boy-child's mother arrives (with a giggling, useless husband in tow) and makes it absolutely clear that she brings war and not peace: The marriage has to end, and Anora has to go. Madison is flawless in these closing scenes: stunned, heartbroken, unable to respond to the tentative romantic gestures of a Russian henchman who's taken a shine to her. Poor Arona is not only thwarted but maybe defeated. God help her.

Anora is in theaters now.

4: Emilia Pérez

This Netflix film is a complete original, a crazy mashup of genres and themes. Directed by a Frenchman (Jacques Audiard), it's a Mexican musical-comedy-melodrama about a drug lord who transitions from male to female with the help of an ambitious and skillful attorney (Zoe Saldaña). As a woman, the ex-drug lord rechristens herself Emilia Pérez, becomes a philanthropist and champion of social justice — pretty rich coming from a former kingpin of crime — and makes a foolhardy attempt to form a new kind of family with a pampered, petulant ex-wife (Selena Gomez) and their children.

Emilia's drive and willfulness, combined with a new sense of maternal obligation, would have exhausted Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and all those legendary stars who played hard-working, social-climbing dames in old Hollywood movies — some of which, particularly Crawford's Queen Bee, probably contributed to Emilia's corkscrew DNA. As Emilia, trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón has the warmth of an earth mother, but that warmth can't completely defrost the cold-bloodedness of her past. It's a performance that will be celebrated throughout the awards season, although I found myself gravitating more to Gomez, with her glamour and sour malice. One complaint: The musical numbers are too brief.

Emilia Pérez is now streaming on Netflix.

5: The Outrun

Saoirse Ronan, who taps into natural forces so authentically she could probably turn herself into a tree — trembling leaves, birds' nest and all of that — is extraordinary as a young alcoholic woman finding rebirth in remote Scotland. Ronan's relationship to the camera can't be explained, but when everything is clicking you could probably call it a love affair. The actress is magnetic, whether she's drunk, troubled and drab or calmly radiant as she reaches a new stability in her life. There are good, sympathetic performers from the supporting cast, among them Saskia Reeves (Slow Horses) as Ronan's mother. I just wish I cared.

It's only fair to note, thought, that even Ronan can occasionally get lost in a production: This year she also starred in Blitz, a viscerally thrilling recreation of the German bombing of London in World War II. But all that stunning havoc was built on a weak, muddled script that left Ronan dramatically stranded as a woman whose son has gone missing. The film may have been aiming for the primal mother-child connection that made Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun so moving. If so, it was buried in the rubble.

The Outrun is available to rent or own on demand.

6: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Anya Taylor-Joy is the feminist hero of this Mad Max: Fury Road prequel, a visual stunner full of choking desert dust and roaring steampunk cars. In this environment, the Road Runner, having outwitted Wile E. Coyote's traps in all those cartoons, would wind up flattened against the tar. The backstory to Charlize Theron's Furiosa, a gnarly warrior of the post-apocalypse, the film is perhaps more of an epic than its predecessor, starting with Furiosa's near-Edenic childhood and concluding, some two-and-a-half hours later, with the traumatic loss of her arm under circumstances that could be called hellish. All of this, along with endless action scenes, is directed with swift, vivid boldness and mechanical precision by director George Miller. And yet Furiosa was met with indifference by moviegoers, who seemed to prefer the vast, stately vision of Denis Villeneuve's superb Dune: Part Two. (Taylor-Joy has a cameo there, by the way.) But it's just show business, isn't it? Nothing to get furiosa about. We move on.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is now streaming on Max.

7: A Real Pain

Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg and Succession's Kieran Culkin play formerly close cousins trying to re-bond during a group tour of Poland. The title and setup might make you think you're embarking on yet another buddies-on-the-road story, but the film slowly reveals tremendous depths of sorrowful empathy — it ends up being about many kinds of pain, among them the agony of mental illness (Culkin's character, for all his slacker humor, is crippled by some undiagnosed form of depression), Jewish history (did I mention that the tour is focused on Holocaust sites?) and how subsequent generations of American Jews have continued to grapple with the shadow of genocide. In its way, A Real Pain is a more complex film than last year's Oscar-winning Zone of Interest, a brutally cold but also rather obvious study of a Nazi family living out a suburban fantasy next to a concentration camp.

A Real Pain is in theaters now.

8: Hit Man

Glen Powell lands a much-deserved leading-man vehicle in this larky comedy from director Richard Linklater (Boyhood), and he handles the responsibility with a kind of sexy graciousness that never pushes the humor too hard. He plays Gary Johnson, a philosophy professor who develops a unique second career with the New Orleans police posing as an assassin-for-hire in order to entrap disgruntled wives, husbands and lovers willing to pay to rid their lives of other human encumbrances.

The issue of entrapment is an interesting one, but Hit Man is too playful to get hung up on that or other moral and ethical issues. Even Gary's would-be clients tend to be likable. Why hold their murderous impulses against them? Hit Man ultimately is more about Gary's romance with another potential paycheck (Adria Arjona), who has some of the enticingly dangerous appeal of a femme fatale out of a James M. Cain thriller. However, as sex symbols go, Powell is the winner here. When he appears in a white tee, you want to tear it off with your teeth.

Hit Man is now streaming on Netflix.

9: Nickel Boys

Novelist Colson Whitehead has enjoyed great good fortune with the adaptations of his two most recent novels. The Underground Railroad, both a history and an allegory about an enslaved woman who escapes from a Southern plantation, became an unblinkingly strong Prime Video series. Now his Pulitzer winner, Nickel Boys, has been turned into an equally uncompromising yet at times surprisingly lyrical film directed by RaMell Ross. When a Black teen (Ethan Herisse) is unjustly sent off to a notorious Florida reform school, a life of promise is derailed. The camera's shifts in perspective only deepen the hurt and ultimately complicate the question of how racism can be overcome. Probably the year's most haunting film.

Nickel Boys is in select New York theaters Dec. 13, then select Los Angeles theaters Dec. 20 before expanding nationwide in the following weeks.

10: Inside Out 2

The most successful cartoon in history, this sequel to Pixar's beloved 2015 hit doesn’t stint on the original’s ingenuity or emotional honesty, but what’s happening this time (inside and out) is adolescence. Which means heroine Riley's mind has to make room for new feelings: These include Anxiety, Embarrassment and — the special companion of any adolescent who wants his or her growing existential doubts to be noticed and taken seriously by everyone else in the room — Ennui, limp as an overcooked strand of linguini.

Note: I should let you know that in compiling this list for the Dec. 9 issue of PEOPLE, I went with Inside Out 2 over the beautiful and moving The Wild Robot, which will almost certainly be its competitor in the upcoming Oscars race. My decision was based on what might seem a trivial as well as an unkind excuse: I just didn't take to the movie's little protagonist, a goose named Brightbill. What can I say? I apologize to Brightbill's fan base and hope they all take flight on their own wings of courage.

That said, when I was still weighing the one cartoon against the other, I hadn't seen the stunning Latvian animated feature Flow, a meditative, dialogue-free tale about cat trying to survive in a world where the rivers keep surging and swallowing up the land. It's zen-sational (ha-ha) and superior to either Inside Out 2 or The Wild Robot.

Inside Out 2 is now streaming on Disney+.