The 10 Best Movies of 2024 Toronto International Film Festival

Actor-turned-director Brady Corbet goes for broke in this wildly ambitious, wonderfully realized story of a Hungarian architect named Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody, brilliant) who flees to the U.S. near the end of WWII and is conscripted by a rich industrialist (Guy Pearce) to build a community center in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He soon finds himself choking to death on the American Dream. The vibe is vintage 1970s epic character-study, complete with a marathon running time, an intermission and a 70mm print struck for future bigger-than-life screenings; what Corbet and his cast (including Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Isaach de Bankolé and Alessandro Nivola) achieve within the massive scope and scale of this modern masterpiece, however, is singular.

Yoshii (Masaki Suda) discovers that he can make a killing by buying used goods for peanuts then reselling them, under a fake name, for an exorbitant price on a digital-retail platform. Sure, he occasionally fudges the truth a tad by relabeling household items as “miracle machines,” but business is steady enough to allow this young man and his materialistic girlfriend (Kotone Furakawa) to move out of Tokyo to the country and hire an assistant (Daiken Okudaira). Then a bunch of folks who feel they’ve been wronged by this mystery e-grifter band together via a Reddit thread, discover his true identity and decide to hunt him down. Writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has never been a huge advocate of the internet (see: Pulse), but the legendary Japanese filmmaker’s sharp, tense, surprisingly funny take on the always-online world circa right now feels like he’s taking his grudge to a whole other level.

The big winner at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Mati Diop’s follow-up to 2019’s Atlantics follows the reclamation of treasures from the West African nation of Benin — formerly known as the Kingdom of Dahomey — stolen in the late 1800s by French occupiers. Once these prized possessions are returned to their rightful home, the reaction from contemporary citizens ranges from relief to rage over the fact that only 26 items out of the hundreds plundered had been handed back. Meanwhile, the objects themselves wonder aloud (!) what it means to be removed from their contextual origins. A thrilling, thoughtful, totally unique take on the legacy of colonialism, the toll of a history that involves the subjugation of others and the way in which cultural artifacts play into a country’s identity.

Latvia’s submission to the Oscars for Best International Film this year is an animated movie that follows a cat trying to survive a natural catastrophe after the lush valley it calls home is severely flooded. It eventually joins forces with a dog, a stork-like bird, a capybara and a lemur to commandeer a boat and seek shelter on higher ground. There’s zero dialogue, the animation looks like a cut scene from The Legend of Zelda, and, in what feels like the boldest of moves, director Gints Zilbalodis forgoes any easy attempts to anthropomorphize these creatures — it’s a little like watching the most thrilling nature documentary ever sketched. Simply stunning.

Mike Leigh returns to the modest, immeasurably moving character-driven dramas he made his name with back when he was doing Play for Today for the BBC — and gives us one of his single most memorable protagonists in the form of Pansy (Secrets & Lies‘ Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a woman who can find the storm cloud behind every silver lining. She has a tendency to criticize everything from her neighbors’ parenting skills (“What does a baby need a pocket for? Is it carrying a knife?!”) to the eating habits of her husband (David Webber) and hulking grown son (Tuwaine Barrett). When she’s not in attack mode and ripping into her family and friends, however, Pansy tends to become paralyzed with fear of the world around her, and it’s in the disparity between these two modes that Leigh and his lead actor slowly map out the inner world of a broken spirit. It’s not an overstatement to say that Baptiste delivers the performance of her career, much less the one that left us most gutted at the fest; she’s equaled by Michele Austin as Pansy’s sister, the one person who can offer solace and share in what sounds like a generational trauma suffered by both of them.

In 1984, talk-radio host Alan Berg was assassinated outside his home in Denver. An FBI agent (Jude Law) thinks it might be connected to a series of bank robberies throughout the Pacific Northwest that he’s been tracking. Worse, this killing might also be tied in to the growing presence of White Supremacists in the American midwest, notably a group known as “The Order” — who want nothing more than to turn the racist screed The Turner Diaries into a real-life race war. Nicholas Hoult plays the hatemonger-in-chief who’s behind these seemingly random crimes, Tye Sheridan is the young cop who joins the hunt and Jurnee Smollett is a fellow Fed ready to back up her partner’s hunch that something more sinister is going on, while director Justin Kurzel (Nitram, The Snowtown Murders) knows exactly how to stage a true-crime thriller without being too sensationalist. But this is really Law’s show, and he gives the kind of committed, rugged-yet-subtle performance here that reminds you what a real, honest-to-God talent he genuinely is.

Motherhood can be a bitch — and trust Marielle Heller’s biting adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel to not only literalize that sentiment, but to turn into something liberating instead. Having pressed paused on a fulfilling professional career to raise her son while her husband (Scoot McNairy) is perpetually away on business, an artist (Amy Adams) who’s simply referred to as “Mother” [ahem] finds her rinse-repeat existence as a caregiver is starting to become a little claustrophobic. Then she begins to grow odd tufts of hair on her lower back, experiences cravings for raw meat… and soon spends her nights roaming the streets as a dog. The magical-realist touch is almost beside the point; in both Adams’ and the A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood director’s hands, this story of a woman bonding with her inner canine channels the rage of the book in the most potent way possible. And if you’ve ever wanted to see the star of Enchanted sink her teeth into a role that requires her to roll around, bark, and completely lose herself in one woman’s fall and rise — welcome!

William Burroughs’ early novella turned a real-life doomed love affair into a story of ex-pat life as endless cruising — for sex, for drugs, for somebody who could truly admire and accept you for who you were. It takes an artist of Luca Guadagnino’s caliber to bring this controversial book to the screen, but to do it justice while also making it his own. Here, the author’s literary counterpart, Bill Lee (played by Daniel Craig in pure scorched-earth mode), seems to know that he’ll never truly win over the younger man (Drew Starkey) who’s capture his heart and revved up his libido in a Mexico that could double as Querelle‘s sister city. But that doesn’t stop him from inviting the handsome gent from accompanying him to South America to take ayahuasca in the name of one adventurous last hurrah. It’s an audaciously stylish movie, with Craig’s cracked-open portrayal of the author immediately making you forget about secret agents and Southern-dandy sleuths. In a perfect world, he’d be prepping an Oscars speech right now.

A minor-key gem tucked away in the fest’s Platform section, Petar Valchanov and Kristina Grozeva’s bone-dry satire takes an allegedly true story from the 1990s — involving Bulgarian military officers on a top-secret mission to communicate with extraterrestrial life — and adds a few extra layers of absurdism into the mix. A general, a clairvoyant who may or may not be his mistress, his top-ranking colonel and a small platoon of troops trek out to the countryside in search of what they believe is a beacon left by aliens. The matter is complicated by the colonel’s daughter Slava, played by Borat Subsequent Moviefilm‘s breakout star Maria Bakalova, who might actually have psychic powers and manages to discover… something. From there, chaos reigns, along with age-old examples of human pettiness. So much of this works thanks to Bakalova, who balances a space-case daffiness with a true sense of innocence.

To the residents of a rural village at the foot of the Italian Alps, the Great War is something that’s happening to another country, in another world. Then one of the local men who’s gone off to fight returns home, wounded and with a fellow solider (Giuseppe De Domenico) from Sicily, and the enormity of what’s happening slowly starts to creep into their existence. The local teacher (Tommaso Ragno), a gray-haired authority who loves classical music and literature, preaches tolerance to those who wonder about the outsider; eventually, the stranger and the teacher’s daughter (Martina Scrinzi) marry. Seasons pass, time goes by, and despite the fact that life-during-wartime goes on for these folks, tragedy lurks right around the corner. The runner-up winner at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Maura Delpero’s breathtaking drama clearly comes from an old-school strain of Italian cinema that prizes realism over flights of fancy — you can imagine that somewhere out there, the late, great Taviani brothers are looking down on this movie with a sense of pride. Yet its earthy pleasures and ability to make you feel immersed in its world before snatching the rug out from you is strictly its own. This was one of the last things I saw at TIFF this year. I couldn’t have asked for a better ending to the festival.