Top Ten for 2024 explore personal and political themes  

As always, I agonize over choosing the year's top films, choosing those that best explore important political and/or personal issues with extraordinary insight in masterful aesthetic and technical ways. All should also include superb performances. With those criteria in mind, through difficult choices, here are my top ten for 2024.  

1. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”: Iranian writer/director Mohammad Rasoulof interweaves capitulation and resistance to the tyrannical Iranian regime infused with volatile family dynamics in a stunning drama.
2. "Flow": Latvian writer/director Gints Zilbalodis presents an ingenious, 3D animated film told from an expressive black cat's point-of-view. No human voices intrude in this poignant lesson of interdependency.
3. “All We Imagine as Light”: Indian writer/director Payal Kapadia probes the challenges of Mumbai's societal layers through the lives of three medical care workers. The women’s friendship buoys their lives and sustains them.
4. “Emilia Pérez”: French director Jacques Audiard upends genres with his musical crime comedy of a narco trafficker who transitions to a woman. Blending suspense, humor, and violence with fabulous singing and dancing, it whisks characters through an array of emotions.
5. "Conclave": German/Austrian/Swiss director Edward Berger infiltrates the jockeying for power as Roman Catholic cardinals select a new Pope. Political intrigue and depths of deceit unfold like an intricate chess match.
6. "Dahomey": French Senegalese Mati Diop's documentary tracks the return of twenty-six artifacts appropriated in the1890s by French colonial powers. The past and present collide in university students' philosophical reactions.
7. "Nickel Boys": In American RaMell Ross' superb adaptation of Colson Whitehead's 2019 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, a first-person, subjective camera captures Turner's and Elwood's friendship amidst sadistic, racist brutality at the Nickel Academy in Florida. That this is based on a true story intensifies the impact.
8. "Sing Sing": U.S. Director Greg Kwedar's marvelous presentation of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at New York's Maximum Security Prison. Writing, rehearsing, debating, and performing, the prisoners find a lifeline and connection through their theater work, forging bonds previously nonexistent.
9. "The Room Next Door:" Spanish writer/director Pedro Almodóvar's first English-language film features Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore perfectly paired in a profound, perceptive contemplation of ending one's life. Exquisitely conveying the dignity and love of two friends, it surveys emotion, insecurity, and fear through their deep, heartbreaking bond.
10. "September 5": Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum recreates the historical trauma of the 1972 Munich Olympics when the Black September group killed Israeli athletes and coaches. Insisting on truthful reporting, told entirely from within the ABC Sports control room, the painful shock and intense horror has not diminished of this first live terrorist broadcast.

Here are ten worthy runners-up that made my top ten choices very difficult: A Complete Unknown, A Real Pain, Close Your Eyes, Evil Does Not Exist, Hard Truths, Last Summer, Lee, Maria, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, and Sugarcane. All international films have English subtitles. Full reviews of all these may be found on the KDHX website or will be posted there when the films open.