Best films of 2024: Scotsman critic Alistair Harkness names his top ten

Anora | Drew Daniels / UPI Media

Anora (18) Maybe it’s too early to call next year’s best actress Oscar race, but if Anora star Mikey Madison doesn’t end up being the front-runner something is very wrong. As the lead in Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner, she gives everything to the title role of a sex worker whose brief relationship with the wastrel son of a Russian oligarch leads to a whole heap of trouble after a week of purchased “fun” results in a spontaneous Vegas wedding and some swift reprisals from her new husband’s family, as they desperately try to get the marriage annulled.

The Substance (18) Set within a garish, fetid vision of Hollywood that’s cartoonishly over-the-top, but is also, perhaps, a figurative reflection of the the extent to which the industry’s base contempt for women has helped distort society as a whole, The Substance casts Demi Moore as the improbably named Elisabeth Sparkles, a once in-demand Hollywood actress whose latter-day career as a Jane Fonda-esque exercise guru is on the point of collapse thanks to the whims of a repugnant media executive called – but of course – “Harvey” (Dennis Quaid). Following a car crash, however, she finds herself in a doctor’s office where a mysterious young intern slips her information about an experimental medical product that generates a younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of anyone who uses it.

Love Lies Bleeding (15) A wild, audacious, crime-soaked love story Love Lies Bleeding takes its 1980s bodybuilding backdrop as a creative cue to deliver a pumped-up slice of entertainingly lurid pulp fiction. The sophomore feature of Saint Maud’s British writer/director Rose Glass, it casts Kristen Stewart as Lou, the mullet-sporting manager of a rundown New Mexico gym whose strained relationship with her gun-running father (Ed Harris) comes to a violent head with the arrival in town of Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an Oklahoma drifter en route to a bodybuilding contest in Las Vegas. A brutal killing involving Lou’s scumbag brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco) then sets both women on a path to potential ruin.

Hit Man (15) Directed by Richard Linklater and co-written with star Glen Powell, this “somewhat true story” revolves around Gary Johnson (Powell), a divorced philosophy professor who spends his spare time moonlighting for the New Orleans Police Department as a tech-ops assistant, helping them set up wiretaps for sting operations in murder-for-hire cases. This normally means sitting in the van monitoring video and audio feeds while his undercover colleague Jasper (Austin Amelio) poses as an assassin to get a confession of criminal intent on tape. But when Jasper is suspended, Gary is drafted in at the last minute to take his place and, to everyone’s surprise, unleashes his inner Daniel Day Lewis, improvising hilariously and gradually building up a raft of alter egos tailored to whichever disgruntled spouse, employee or family member he’s trying to put away.

Aaron Pierre as Terry Richmond in Rebel Ridge | Netflix

Rebel Ridge (15) Blue Ruin and Green Room writer/director Jeremy Saulnier returns with Rebel Ridge, a hard-charging action film with a one-man-against-a-corrupt-town plot. Saulnier uses an initiative to defund a local police force as a catalyst for even more corruption, courtesy of the town’s chief of police (Don Johnson) using a loophole in legal search-and-seizure procedures to replenish their budgets and maintain their old ways unchallenged. Into this situation stumbles Terry Richards (Aaron Pierre), an ex-Marine en route to the town’s court house to post bail for his cousin. Knocked off his bike by racist cops looking for their next payday, Terry’s status as a Black man in a predominantly white town full of trigger-happy police means he has to play their game. But when they take his bail money and his savings and start threatening him with trumped-up, all-too-plausible charges, he’s forced to put his own specialised military training to use.

Challengers (15) Luca Guadagnino serves up an ace with Challengers, a sexy, funny, emotionally wrought tennis drama set during a single match, but encapsulating 13 years of friendship, rivalry and sexual misadventures. The players are Art Donaldson (West Side Story’s Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) – the former a confidence-rattled top seed in need of a few easy wins en route the US Open, the latter a raffish also-ran scraping together a living on the less prestigious challengers circuit. That they have history is clear from the way they stalk each other on opposite sides of the court and keep eyeing up the same beautiful woman (Zendaya) watching closely from the crowd.

The Zone of Interest (12A) There’s not all that much to “get" in The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s multi-Oscar nominated adaptation of Martin Amis’s Holocaust novel of the same name. For all its considerable cinematic flair it arrives at its central, horrifying conceit fairly swiftly and never wavers from following it through to its numbing endpoint. Setting the film mostly on the edges of Auschwitz, Glazer’s first images are ones of bucolic bliss as a German family – mum, dad, their various children – enjoy a picnic near a beautiful lake before retreating (after a grim discovery in the water) to their well-appointed home. Its Edenic garden, we soon realise, shares a barbed wire-topped wall with the concentration camp, and Glazer underscores the grotesque irony of the family’s idyllic existence with a near-constant soundtrack of appalling ambience: screams, gunshots, the chilling hiss of the gas chambers.

Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter in Poor Things. PIC: Searchlight Pictures/Yorgos Lanthimos

Poor Things (18) ‘Readers who want a good story plainly told should go at once to the main part of the book.’ So wrote Alasdair Gray in the faux introduction to his novel Poor Things – and so director Yorgos Lanthimos obliges, sort of, with this entertainingly ribald adaptation. Excising the frame stories, the Glasgow setting and everything Scottish bar Willem Dafoe’s wavering accent, the director brings the twisted story at the heart of Gray’s 1992 opus to life in sumptuous, phantasmagorical fashion. That story revolves around Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, whom we first glimpse from behind leaping from Tower Bridge. Her remarkable performance, which lets us experience the world through Bella’s eyes, from monstrous baby to a fully cognisant adult, is a work of demented brilliance.

Green Border (15) The latest from veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa) is a contender for the most distressing film ever made. It’s also one of the most urgent. Following refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Africa, as well as a border guard and a conscience-stricken civilian as they all intersect on the Polish/Belarus border, it’s a brutal, angry, deeply moral exploration of the immigration crisis. In particular it exposes the savage game of political ping-pong the authorities on both sides are playing with the lives of refugees, batting them back and forth across the border with callous indifference following Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko’s attempts to destabilise the European Union and the Polish government’s hardline stance against the influx of new migrants.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (18) This is a brilliantly outré, nearly three-hour-long mind-melter of a film from Romanian director Radu Jude. A sort of free-form, largely black-and-white state-of-the-nation provocation, it follows Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a sleep-deprived production assistant for a film and video company in Bucharest that has been hired by a negligent Austrian company to coerce employees injured at work to implicate themselves by appearing in health and safety videos admitting they didn’t wear regulation safety helmets. Patently absurd, but horrifying at the same time.