© Studio Canal, BBC Film, Protagonist Pictures, Brock Media & Arcade PicturesIt was a year when 'Oppenheimer' swept the Oscars but Ryan Gosling stole the show with his performance of 'I'm Just Ken'.
It was also the year when Saoirse Ronan once again aced her roles in two films and Cillian Murphy delivered arguably the best movie performance of his career.
2024 saw Denis Villeneuve open the door to a 'Dune' trilogy, while successful films about a Mexican drug gang leader seeking a sex change and a gay writer encountering the ghosts of his dead parents were common place when in the past they would have been unthinkable.
As Pomona ranks the top 10 films it saw this year, who made the list and where are they placed?
10. THE OUTRUN (Nora Fingscheidt)
There have been many movies about alcoholism over the decades but few have been as intriguing as Nora Fingscheidt's tale of a young woman coming to terms with her addiction on the Orkney Islands.
Saoirse Ronan turns in another great performance in a stellar career as Rona who returns to her family home after her life falls apart in London.
Flitting between her struggle to beat her addiction on the Scottish islands and flashbacks of her life in London, Fingscheidt's adaptation of Amy Lipton's memoir of the same name really dives deep into the psychology of addiction.
At the same time, it avoids all the usual addiction drama clichés through some incredibly smart visual metaphors and impressively captured images of the Orkneys and London by cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer.
Stephen Dillane and Saskia Reeves are terrific as Rona's parents, while Paapa Essiedu and Izuka Hoyle also make significant contributions as her boyfriend and close friend in London who cannot prevent her life disintegrating.
It is to Fingscheidt's credit that 'The Outrun' never slides into melodrama or goes over the top in its romanticisation of the undoubtedly stunning, isolated landscapes of the Orkneys.
This slice of cinema verite is Ronan's film and if it doesn't land her another Best Actress nomination at the Oscars, then that would be a major injustice.
9. DUNE, PART II (Denis Villeneuve)
After the impressive epic sweep of his first instalment of Frank Herbert's cult sci-fi classic in 2021, Denis Villeneuve returned with an even more jaw dropping sequel.
Now living among the desert dwelling rebels known as the Fremen, Timothee Chalamet's Paul Atriedes finds himself torn between his love for Zendaya's warrior Chani and the weight of expectation that he might be a prophet.
Can he defeat the forces of darkness led by Stellan Skarsgard's Baron Vladimir Harkkonen, Dave Bautista's thuggish Rabban and Austin Butler's Feyd-Rautha?
With Christopher Walken, Florence Pugh and Lea Seydoux joining returning cast members Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Charlotte Rampling and Rebecca Ferguson as Paul's mother Lady Jessica, the French Canadian director takes his audience to places they might not expect.
Visually stunning CGI effects, epic sets and eye catching costumes help make this a superior blockbuster that's galaxies away from the empty spectacle that most Marvel superhero movies have been.
Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts' intelligent screenplay and their willingness to tackle big themes like faith, power, corruption and betrayal sets this version apart from previous adaptations of 'Dune' and other shallow sci-fi franchise epics.
It's a monumental achievement. Roll on Part III.
8.BLITZ (Steve McQueen)
Is Steve McQueen capable of making a disappointing movie?
From 'Hunger' and 'Shame' to the Oscar Best Picture winning 'Twelve Years A Slave,' 'Widows' and the 'Small Axe' anthology, he's been one of the most impressive directors of the past 16 years - taking on the toughest of subjects and fashioning graceful, compelling, visually striking stories around them.
'Blitz' is no different.
On one level it's an affectionate tribute to his home city of London and the resilience its population showed in the face of Nazi aerial bombardments.
But it is also a wonderful fusion of a childhood adventure, an affectionate family portrait and a celebration of a multi ethnic city.
Elliott Heffernan is superb as George, the young boy at the heart of the story who escapes a train evacuating him to the countryside and embarks on a dangerous trek through the war ravaged streets of London instead to be reunited with his mum.
Saoirse Ronan is terrific as his mum Rita, with Paul Weller, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clementine, Kathy Burke, Stephen Graham, Hayley Squires, Erin Kellyman, Leigh Gill, Alex Jennings and Celeste all making their mark in supporting roles.
Given a brief theatrical run before it landed on Apple TV+, this is one of those movies that should be seen on the largest TV screen you have with a great sound system if you are really going to appreciate in your home.
French cinematographer Yorik Le Saux's images, Jacqueline Durran's costumes, Adam Stockhausen's production design, Hans Zimmer's score and the work of the sound design, hair, make-up and visual effects teams deserve to be savoured on as big and noisy a canvas as possible.
7. THE HOLDOVERS (Alexander Payne)
Payne's tale of a boarding school student, a bourbon swilling classics teacher and a grieving cook forced to spend Christmas together in an abandoned Massachusetts college is a welcome return to form for the Nebraskan director.
A delightful throwback to the great comedy dramas of the 1970s, the film boasts superb performances from Paul Giamatti as a pompous, stiff shirted, disillusioned teacher, Dominic Sessa as an intelligent, rebellious student abandoned by his mother during the Festive season and Da'Vine Joy Randolph who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing a grieving mother coming to terms with the loss of her son in the Vietnam War.
In the best tradition of Payne's finest movies, 'The Holdovers' brilliantly fuses pathos with comedy, with its flawed central characters quickly earning the right to engage our sympathies.
Golden Globe winner Giamatti was unlucky to come up against Cillian Murphy in the battle for the Best Actor Oscar and would have been a worthy winner.
But while he failed to capture the statuette, his performance will live long as one of the best comedy performances of recent times in a film that should also become a bittersweet Christmas classic for decades to come.
6. MONKEY MAN (Dev Patel)
Starring and directed by Patel, this Indian answer to the 'John Wick' franchise turned out to be the best action thriller of 2024.
Patel plays Kid, a wrestler in a monkey mask in an underground fight club in Mumbai who is on a quest to kill a corrupt police chief, Sikandar Kher's Rana who murdered his mother when he was a child.
Infiltrating a brothel and cocaine den run by Ashwini Kalsekar's Queenie Kapoor, Kid sets an elaborate trap for his target.
However it doesn't go smoothly, setting in train a tidal wave of violence.
Stylishly directed by Patel with the help of Sharone Meir's vibrant cinematography and David Jancso, Tim Murrell and Joe Galdo's rapid fire editing, the film doesn't slavishly follow Liam Neeson style revenge thriller tropes.
Instead it becomes a meditation on the inequities of India's caste system and corruption at the heart of the country's political system.
It may be an exhausting watch but every single second is simply exhilarating.
5. EMILIA PEREZ (Jacques Audiard)
A musical about a Mexican drug cartel kingpin who undergoes gender realignment survey to become woman and then poses as his kid's aunt sounds totally bonkers.
Yet amazingly Audiard's multilingual tale starring Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez and Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascon is a triumph - easily outshining Todd Phillips' equally daring but not quite as successful attempt at creating a twisted musical with 'Joker: Folie A Deux'.
In a breakthrough performance, Gascon is stunning as Juan 'Manitas' Del Monte who engages Zoe Saldana's lawyer Rita Mora Castro to help him fulfil his long held desire to become a woman and then entrusts her years later to help her masquerade as his former self's wealthy sister so she can live with Selena Gomez's widow Jessi and their kids.
Saldana and Gomez sparkle in Audiard's stylish movie which scooped the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year and drew critical adulation for just going in unexpected directions.
The three principals are so good that Cannes rewarded them plus Adriana Paz who plays Epifania, the wife of a man who fell foul of the drug cartels, with the Festival's Best Actress award.
Adapted for the screen by Audiard, Thomas Bidegain and Lea Mysius from Boris Razon's 2018 novel 'Ecoute,' expect the Netflix acquired film, which also stars Edgar Ramirez and Mark Ivanir, to figure strongly during awards season and not just in the acting, writing and directing categories.
Camille and Clement Ducot's musical score and original songs are unlike anything you have ever heard - not least because of their subject matter.
Paul Guilhaume's dazzling cinematography, Julia Floch Carbonel and Simon Livet's wonderful make-up and Juliet Welfling's pulsating editing deserve Oscar attention too.
Can it go all the way to Best Picture and a hatful of other gongs?
It's a big ask of an Academy that will in all likelihood be wary of a conservative backlash in the America of Trump 2.0 but it would certainly be deserved for a genuinely groundbreaking film.
4. ALL OF US STRANGERS (Andrew Haigh)
When people look back on 2024's awards season, they will be mystified by the way this highly original, critically lauded indie film was ignored by several academies.
Andrew Haigh's highly original romantic fantasy should have mopped up Oscar nominations galore for its writer-director, cast and several of its crew but it didn't get a single nod.
Its lead Andrew Scott only managed a solitary Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor and he was bizarrely overlooked on the movie's home turf in Britain by BAFTA, while his co-stars Paul Mescal and Claire Foy got nods for their supporting performances along with Haigh for writing and direction.
A haunting and surreal tale about a gay writer who re-connects with the ghosts of his parents, played by Foy and Jamie Bell, when visiting his childhood home, Scott makes for an entrancing lead whose relationship with Mescal's enigmatic tower block neighbour also fascinates.
Beautifully shot by Jamie D Ramsay and wonderfully paced by film editor Jonathan Albert, it boasts a cast on peak form and is anchored by Scott's charismatic, understated lead performance.
Haigh's film brilliantly fuses Emile Levienese-Farrouch's subtle musical score with memorable needle drops by the Pet Shop Boys, Fine Young Cannibals, The Housemartins, Alison Moyet, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Blur.
In future years, as memories of other movies that fared better during awards season fade, this film will continue to outshine them.
3. CIVIL WAR (Alex Garland)
In the year of another brutally divisive US Election, Alex Garland fired a stern warning shot about how the antagonistic political climate currently in America could end up destroying the nation.
Without apportioning blame, the English novelist and director painted a disturbing picture of a country that could easily slide into a second civil war by telling the story through the eyes of reporters and photojournalists covering the conflict.
Kirsten Dundst is in superb form as Lee Smith, an acclaimed war photographer chronicling attempts to overthrow Nick Offerman's despotic three term President.
Reluctantly taking Callie Spaeny's wet about the ears photographer Jessie Collins under her wing, the two of them embark on an 'Apocalypse Now' style sweep through New York, Pennsylvania and North Carolina en route to the White House alongside Wagner Moura's Reuters reporter Joel and Stephen McKinlay-Henderson's veteran New York Times Sammy.
Packed full of memorably violent and shocking vignettes - not least in a sequence that features a blistering cameo by Jesse Plemons in novelty sunglasses and another where a gun battle is accompanied unexpectedly by a needle drop of De La Soul's 'Say No Go' - the film, like 'Blitz,' immediately recalls recent footage of atrocities carried out in Gaza, the Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and the Ukraine.
Filmed with a burning intensity by cinematographer Rob Hardy and thrillingly edited by Jake Roberts, Garland takes his audience to the heart of the action and provides enough sobering moments for viewers to question the insanity of America's currently aggressive political discourse.
Ignored in the Golden Globe nominations, Dundst certainly deserves to be in contention in 2025's awards season and possibly Moura, Spaeny, McKinlay-Henderson and Plemons but perhaps the theme of Garland's movie is too close to the bone.
Is anyone listening to the film's core message, though?
The next four years of life under President Donald Trump and Elon Musk will reveal all.
2. SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE
Adapted by Enda Walsh from a much admired novella by fellow Irish writer Claire Keegan, Belgian director Tim Mielants delivers one of the most haunting, quietly devastating films of recent times.
The story of Cillian Murphy's Co Wexford coal merchant Bill Furlong's increasing unease about a mother and baby home run by nuns in his home town of New Ross, the film is a superb study of a society in the grip of a church that has become so self important it has lost all sense of Christianity, empathy and basic decency.
While the horrific treatment of unmarried mothers in Ireland has been powerfully explored before in films like Peter Mullen's angry 'The Magdalene Sisters,' Mielants' movie takes a much more subtle approach - focusing on the community around the mother and baby home and exploring the trauma inflicted on those who are aware of the terrible injustice taking place among them but are choosing to pretend it just isn't happening.
Murphy is brilliant as a decent man whose own childhood traumas weigh so heavily on him, he is compelled to act.
Emily Watson and Clare Dunne are excellent as well as nuns who have a Mafia style grip over his town, while Eileen Walsh, who also starred in Mullan's 2002 movie, shines as Bill's wife who discourages him from taking a stand because she is afraid of the repercussions.
Michelle Fairley impresses as a compassionate woman from Bill's past and is complemented by Mark McKenna as her kind farm hand Ned, Agnes O'Casey as Bill's mum, Helen Behan as the owner of a local pub and Zara Devlin as Sara whose brutal treatment in the mother and baby home not only gnaws away at Bill's conscience but disturbs the audience.
One scene between Watson, Murphy and Devlin around a fireplace stands out, crackling with unbearable tension and a lurking sense of horror.
But it isn't just the cast who shine, with Frank van den Eeden's prying camera beautifully capturing New Ross in the run-up to Christmas in shades of black and amber and Enda Walsh delivering a devastatingly subtle script that creeps up on you and delivers several stinging punches.
Viewers could be forgiven for thinking Mielants' film depicts an Irish town in the 1930s or 50s until you realise from the playing of Dexy Midnight Runners' 'Come On Eileen' in a pub or snatches of 'Danger Mouse' or 'The Les Dawson Show' on the Furlongs' family telly that it is actually the 1980s - meaning it is within living memory of anyone 45 and above watching it in Ireland.
'Small Things Like These' is a wonderful example of how sometimes less is more on the cinema screen.
In what is arguably his greatest ever movie performance, Murphy delivers an 'On The Waterfront' style masterclass in how the best actors can say so much about a character through their physicality and facial expressions while uttering so few words.
1. THE ZONE OF INTEREST (Jonathan Glazer)
Christopher Nolan's epic blockbuster 'Oppenheimer' swept 2024's Oscars.
However when people look back on the race in years to come, one competitor will stand out for its breathtaking brilliance.
Jonathan Glazer's 'The Zone of Interest' is that film and does it by adopting subtle storytelling techniques just like 'Small Things Like These'.
He has created a Holocaust film like no other, exposing the audience to the horrors of Nazi genocide in Auschwitz without ever actually showing the brutality of what occurred.
Adapted from a 2018 Martin Amis' novel, Glazer's film focuses instead on the banality of family life in the home of the camp commandant, Christian Friedl's Rudolph Hoss and his wife, Sandra Huller's Hedwig as the Nazis go about their policy of extermination inside the concentration camp beside their house.
Like 'Small Things Like These,' the fact that the family go about their lives while blocking out the sounds of suffering over the garden wall only magnifies the sense of horror.
With its impeccably framed cinematography by Lukasz Zal, superb editing by Paul Watts and jaw dropping sound design by Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn, Glazer's film is a stone cold classic that will be studied for many years to come.
Winner of two Academy Awards for Best International Feature and Best Sound, it should have garlanded with a lot more awards, with Friedl and Huller unlucky to be squeezed out of the acting categories.
Ultimately, though, it is a cinema experience that will never be forgotten - with Glazer respecting his audience's intelligence and making them use their eyes, ears and brains in a way that few films have ever managed.
It really is a must see.
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