This year’s ranking of the 2024 Best Picture field is here—see the list below with links to full reviews for each film. Afterward, see my writeup for general commentary on the nominees.
10. Maestro (full review)
9. Barbie (full review)
8. Past Lives (full review)
7. Poor Things (full review)
6. American Fiction (full review)
5. The Holdovers (full review)
4. Killers of the Flower Moon (full review)
3. Anatomy of a Fall (full review)
2. Oppenheimer (full review)
1. The Zone of Interest (full review)
Commentary
In the half-decade that I’ve been compiling these rankings, this is the most impressive Best Picture slate that I’ve reviewed. Four of these ten are excellent movies, and at least one of the four is a masterpiece. Add Asteroid City from Wes Anderson, whose mounting pile of snubs will one day haunt the Academy, and you have five valuable additions to twenty-first century cinema.
Among some of these, I detect a common thread: humanity’s paralysis in the face of violent horrors. How timely. Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Zone of Interest all contribute important nuance to what amounts to a masterly cinematic discussion. Perhaps the order in which I’ve ranked them reflects the degree to which their protagonists confront the evil of their inaction: Ernest from Killers remains totally unwilling to do so, while Rudolph from Zone looks straight into the abyss and sees… well, I won’t spoil it for you.
Some may feel that I’ve shortchanged Barbie, the year’s top grossing movie. But to them and those who feel that Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig were snubbed: I entreat you to watch the other films. Barbie operates on a meta level, calling for change in media and institutions. The other films, though, are way ahead of it: they answer that call. Anatomy of a Fall sympathetically portrays an imperfect woman. The Holdovers chronicles and validates a vulnerable masculinity. No grand speeches or recited thinkpieces are necessary for these superior films because they, like all good art, serve as counterpoints to mainstream narratives. They prove their dislike of commercial ideas by leaving them behind. Barbie, meanwhile, produced as it is by the multibillion dollar Mattel corporation, is chained to those ideas, so, to satisfy feminist discoursers, it spends its runtime merely telling us what it dislikes. But lodging complaints is superficial; only charting a new path is authentic. Today’s admirers of the movie may yet come to recognize it as just another guise of the ultimate chameleon, who’s always changing outfits—but always the same underneath.
Outside of the Oscar field, this year was notable for the decline of Disney as a dominant box office force. Marvel films are getting more boring by the week (even from, in my view, an impressively boring foundation), Star Wars may never recover from its last installment, and the animated studio outputs are regressing to 70s/80s-level blandness. Maybe that’s why this was such a good year for big studio films like Oppenheimer: the end of a monopoly is always good for the customer. Let’s see if the empire strikes back in 2024.
–Jim Andersen