In “A Complete Unknown,” the new film directed by James Mangold, a young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) impulsively slips into a movie theatre with his girlfriend, Sylvie (Elle Fanning), to catch a matinée. It turns out to be the classic 1942 melodrama “Now, Voyager,” starring Bette Davis as a shy spinster, Charlotte Vale, who undergoes a profound personal transformation—one with maybe too obvious resonance for Dylan, who will soon be celebrated for the mutability of his identity and the incandescence of his stardom. “Don’t let’s ask for the moon,” Charlotte breathes. “We have the stars”—a justly famous line that bestows a kind of anticipatory magic on the genius in the audience. Dylan will soon eclipse the moon and the stars; he’s a whole damn constellation unto himself.

More than a few movie characters went to the movies this year. It’s fun to consider why they watch what they do—what the filmmakers are trying to signal. Some characters go for a quick turn-on, like László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who, early on in Brady Corbet’s immigrant drama, “The Brutalist,” seeks refuge from a cold, lonely night in a Philadelphia porn theatre. William Lee (Daniel Craig), the lusty protagonist of Luca Guadagnino’s William S. Burroughs adaptation, “Queer,” is a man of more rarefied cinematic tastes; he takes a date to see Jean Cocteau’s “Orpheus” (1950), hoping, of course, that a few hours in the dark will offer a preview of coming attractions. But the scene has a deeper layer of meaning: in Cocteau’s dreamlike masterpiece, we see a warped mirror to Lee’s own soon-to-be-thwarted longing.

What picture does Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse, go to see in Payal Kapadia’s lovely Mumbai-set drama, “All We Imagine as Light”? It’s unclear, but it scarcely matters; if you have ever gone to the movies to escape your own loneliness—to vanish, for a few hours, into the solace of a crowd—you might recognize the happy-sad glimmer in Prabha’s eyes.

Sometimes, even a tornado goes to the movies: in the hit summer blockbuster “Twisters”—whose director, Lee Isaac Chung, is, full disclosure, a friend—a huge storm blows into a small Oklahoma town, laying waste to the local theatre and carrying off a couple of ill-fated audience members. When I first saw that sequence, I gasped—and then chuckled a little. The image of a theatre screen, torn asunder by a computer-generated storm, made for a remarkably blunt metaphor for the death of cinema—an inevitability, according to various movie-industry doomsayers. It’s easy to sink into existential gloom about the movies, to succumb to anxieties about diminished box-office returns, dwindling theatrical-release windows, and the increasingly fickleness of the post-pandemic audience. Sure, on occasion they’ll rouse themselves and head to the multiplex for a buzzy sequel such as “Inside Out 2,” “Dune: Part Two,” or “Gladiator II.” Yet the best “2” movie I saw this year, Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2,” wasn’t a sequel, and its theatrical release was insultingly perfunctory.

Most of my favorite movies of 2024 premièred at overseas film festivals, only to flit through U.S. theatres for a few weeks at most. One of them, the luminous Italian drama “La Chimera,” was one of the year’s rare art-house success stories; another, the Palestinian-Israeli documentary “No Other Land,” still hasn’t found an American distributor, and possibly never will. A few of my favorites have yet to open; some are already streaming. That latter category includes my No. 1 title, an ode to the glories of cinema that ends, in an utterly magical sequence, with all its major characters entering a movie theatre. What are they watching, and why? You’ll have to find out for yourself. Don’t stream it on your phone.

Here, then, are the ten—no, eleven—best movies of 2024. With one exception, I have arranged the titles in pairs, firm in my belief that the movies speak to each other as deeply as they spoke to me.

1. “Close Your Eyes”

After a years-long absence from filmmaking, an octogenarian legend reëmerges with a work of art that seems like a career summation. Francis Ford Coppola’s passionate, dazzling, and inevitably polarizing “Megalopolis”? Well, yes (and it’s celebrated further down my list). But the description applies more powerfully to “Close Your Eyes,” the first new feature in more than three decades from the Spanish auteur Víctor Erice, who remains best known for his 1973 début feature, “The Spirit of the Beehive.” His latest brings that masterwork full circle. It begins as a cinephile detective story—in which a retired filmmaker (Manolo Solo) sets out to solve a long-ago disappearance—and then morphs into a wry Hawksian drama of friendship and discovery. In its transcendent final passages, the film takes on the eerily consoling hush of a séance, as if it were confronting us with the very spirit of cinema itself.

2. “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”

3. “Evil Does Not Exist”

Much of the action in Radu Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” a riotously profane and funny jaunt around Bucharest, concerns the filming of a workplace-safety video that, from the start, is clearly a managerial ass-save—an attempt to further exploit those who have already been harmed in occupational injuries. A similarly ill-motivated stab at corporate appeasement figures into Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s deeply haunting drama “Evil Does Not Exist,” which is mostly set in a Japanese village that comes under serious environmental threat. It isn’t just the indictments of collective greed and individual complacency that make Jude’s and Hamaguchi’s films so vital; it’s the way that the directors transfigure aesthetic gambits into moral arguments, deploying formal elisions and narrative ruptures that feel as destabilizing as the modern world itself.

4. “Nickel Boys”

5. “A Different Man”

The two most daring and accomplished American movies of the year are also, at first glance, the most dissimilar. RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” stunningly drawn from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, sustains a rigorous first-person perspective—toggling between two principal characters, both Black teen-agers incarcerated at a juvenile-reformatory facility in Jim Crow-era Florida—to achieve the most lyrical feat of literary adaptation in many a moon. Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man” is a darkly deranged comic fantasia, assembled from a grab bag of mad-scientist horrors, Woody Allen meta-conceits, Roman Polanski paranoiacs, and various barbed, discourse-baiting ideas about authenticity, privilege, and artistic integrity. It’s a patchwork, but one that keeps accumulating ever more brilliant and elaborate patterns of meaning. No spoilers here, but each movie builds to a high-wire moment of physical and psychological transference, while expanding the conceptual possibilities of audience identification—both inside and outside the frame.

6. “La Chimera”

7. “Music”

In which myth becomes breathtakingly modern—and utterly sui generis. The Italian director Alice Rohrwacher rediscovers Orpheus and Eurydice under the Tuscan sun in “La Chimera,” a romantic adventure in which a present-day tomb raider (Josh O’Connor, never better) digs deep for his lost love. Far more explicitly, the German filmmaker Angela Schanelec revisits Oedipus Rex in “Music,” a meticulously plotted riddle about a man who is swept up, with astonishing swiftness and zero exposition, in an ordeal he can scarcely comprehend. The gods prove cruel but not omnipotent, and the modern settings exert their own redemptive pull; the final effect is that of a magic trick, in which the characters manage, in each film’s miraculous closing moments, to slip the bonds of tragedy.

8. “No Other Land”

9. “Green Border”

Two galvanic portraits of mass displacement and dehumanization that generated passionate acclaim and furious blowback. In the harrowing, multi-threaded drama “Green Border,” the veteran filmmaker Agnieszka Holland reveals the Polish-Belarusian boundary to be its own circle of geopolitical Hell, where refugees are abused, politically weaponized, and subject to never-ending horrors; the result is a drama of extraordinary tension and lucid anger, but also of clear-eyed pragmatism, particularly when the focus shifts toward the work of Polish activists, who help whomever they can in impossible circumstances. Activism is also central to the bracing, infuriating documentary “No Other Land,” which details a moving friendship between two men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, as they turn cameras on the Israeli government’s demolition of homes in the occupied southern West Bank. The four filmmakers—a Palestinian-Israeli collective, consisting of Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor—were brave enough to keep filming; with any luck, a U.S. distributor will muster even an ounce of their courage.

10. “All We Imagine as Light”

11. “Hard Truths”

The Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia, in her emotionally overflowing narrative début, “All We Imagine as Light,” inflects fine-grained storytelling with a documentarian’s resourcefulness and insight. In “Hard Truths,” his latest film of many, the English director Mike Leigh hones and intensifies a signature workshop process that empowers his actors to plumb rare depths of emotional truth. What emerged from these realist exercises were two of the year’s most trenchant dramas about women, marked by harmoniously balanced acting—from Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in “All We Imagine as Light,” and from Marianne Jean-Baptiste (in the performance of the year) and Michele Austin in “Hard Truths.” Their work affirms the rewards of female solidarity without pretending that the road to happiness is ever anything, in the end, but a personal journey.

And to make an even twenty, here are nine honorable mentions, in alphabetical order:

“Anora”

Sean Baker’s virtuoso farce rivals Radu Jude’s as a portrait of a working girl driven to gig-economy extremes; in Mikey Madison, a star is born.

“Blitz”

Steve McQueen’s beautifully composed drama shows us war through a Black child’s eyes, and it’s a revelation.

“The Brutalist”

Brady Corbet built it, and you should come—for its classical sweep, its visual majesty, but, most of all, for Guy Pearce.

“Dahomey”

Mati Diop’s brilliantly conceived documentary, about a historic act of postcolonial repatriation, gives everyone (and I do mean everyone) a voice.

“Here”

The Belgian director Bas Devos renews your appetite—for soup, for companionship, and for cinema that treads lightly yet lingers deep in the memory.

“Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell”

Watching this staggering début feature, from the Vietnamese filmmaker Phạm Thiên Ân, is like riding a motorcycle through a ghostly landscape between town and country, reality and dream, the living and the dead.

“Janet Planet”

In Annie Baker’s pitch-perfect first film, a mother and a daughter drift beautifully out of alignment.

“Megalopolis”

For Francis Ford Coppola to realize this gloriously bonkers fever-dream project required decades of patience and, in the end, a good share of his own Northern California vineyards. Fittingly, its most art-averse detractors responded with an awful lot of whine.

“A Real Pain”

Jesse Eisenberg’s wonderful tourist-de-force comedy, in which he and Kieran Culkin play cousins on a trip through Poland, lightly ponders the weight of individual suffering, historical trauma, and the vast chasm that swallows and unites them. ♦