The 10 best films of 2024 - Dan Slevin's picks

Going back through the year to find the films I've rated the highest reveals the kind of films that are likely to push my particular buttons, and a few gaps that I should pay attention to.

There's only one film in this list directed by a woman, for example. Is that a blind spot I should be working on, or just the way the dice have rolled this year?

And while I was glad of the presence of two films bringing a strong Māori perspective to our colonial history, neither The Convert or Ka Whaiwhai Tonu: Struggle Without End were able to oust any of the titles below. And there's no horror in this list, despite it dominating cinemas all year. Go figure.

These are in no particular order (apart from the first, which is the best).

Perfect Days

A modest film about a modest man, Wim Wenders' Perfect Days teaches us the value of contentment and of paying attention to small things. The great Kôji Yakusho plays Hirayama, cleaning the stylish public toilets of Tokyo for a living. This is a film that provides even richer rewards every time you watch it - a classic for the ages.

All of us Strangers

Like Hirayama, Adam (Andrew Scott) lives alone in a small apartment but he has allowed his loneliness to calcify his emotions. A flirtatious approach from a neighbour (Paul Mescal) starts to break down that resistance revealing a deep longing and profound grief. Reviewing Andrew Haigh's All of us Strangers for At the Movies, I said: "It's also a surprisingly spiritual conclusion for a writer and director who has professed his atheism in the past but the divine sense that we are all just stardust forming and reforming and never really leaving each other I found deeply moving."

The Zone of Interest

Here's another film in which truth is revealed through the tiniest details. Jonathan Glazer'sThe Zone of Interest portrays the everyday existence of some of the most evil people ever to walk the earth, the Auschwitz camp commandant (Christian Freidel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller). It's in the final stages of the film that the big ideas - rather than the conceptuality of it - start to land. Where we are asked to think a little bit more about these people and who they are - who they represent, what they mean - and Glazer's filmmaking bravura becomes irresistible.

20 Days in Mariupol

On the subject of evil, this Oscar-winning documentary by Mstyslav Chernov haunted my dreams for weeks afterwards. We only have this record of the Russian atrocities against innocent Ukrainian civilians because a few brave (or foolhardy) local journalists ignored the order to evacuate. It is the remarkable record of the human tragedy that is the lasting legacy of the film. The images may be of Ukraine, but they stand for all the other atrocities that we have not seen. They are specific to Mariupol, but not unique.

Monkey Man

Actor Dev Patel's debut feature as director, Monkey Man, took a standard violent revenge plot (including knowing nods to the boss, John Wick) and fuelled it with anger at the state of India's Hindu nationalist political leadership.

Patel plays a character known in the credits as Kid but who takes on several personas on his way to taking down the corrupt cop who destroyed his village and his future. Monkey Man  is a staggeringly violent watch but it's also an emotional one, the Kid's fists of righteous fury are powered by sorrow at the direction that India is taking. A magnificent achievement.

Robot Dreams

If the violence of Monkey Man is too much for you, Robot Dreams directed by Pablo Berger is a delightful alternative. This is a very sweet little film about a dog (named "Dog") who lives in an anthropomorphised 1980s New York City. He's lonely and sees an ad on late night TV for a kitset robot companion, so he sends away. This robot is the perfect friend and Dog's life is transformed. But a trip to the seaside goes wrong and the robot is stranded, unable to move, just as the summer season is ending and the beach is locked away. As time goes on, any expectation that they will be reunited recedes and the story becomes one of new beginnings and moving on. Except, you never really leave that first love behind, do you?

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The relative box office failure of George Miller's Furiosa was the big disappointment of the year. Prequels shouldn't - and often don't - work because narrative tension is hard to maintain when you know your destination, but while it is a superb film on its own terms, the real triumph of Furiosa is that it manages to make all the other Mad Max films better. Meanwhile, if Furiosa was the best and smartest action film of the year, Jason Statham vehicle The Beekeper was the best and dumbest.

Inside Out 2

We're not supposed to like sequels, especially Disney cash-grab sequels like this one but, golly, did I fall hard for Kelsey Mann's Inside Out 2. It's observant, kind, wholesome and - if you are the parent of a young teenager - probably helpful.

Sasquatch Sunset

I had a quiet New Zealand International Film Festival this year which explains why a few choice candidates might be missing from this list. I did love this film by David & Nathan Zellner about a family of Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) as they roam around the North American wilderness for four challenging seasons. "The performances under all that prosthetic technology are a marvel, especially Riley Keough who manages to project a deep sense of soulfulness through eyes that can see the world but don't understand why it seems determined to cause them such pain," I wrote for RNZ back in July.

Rebel Ridge

In a disappointing year for straight-to-streaming releases, I might have chosen the intimate little family drama His Three Daughters (also on Netflix) but instead plumped for this tightly wound and expertly executed action flick by Jeremy Saulnier about a former Marine on a mission to save his cousin from small town injustice. Instead, he gets caught up in a corrupt plot to strip visitors like him of their money - called "civil forfeiture" and a common way that US police departments fund themselves - and he is forced to escalate matters using his particular set of skills. It's a brilliant example of ticking clock filmmaking and a star-making vehicle for English actor Aaron Pierre.