Deadline’s Best International Films Of 2024
As 2024 draws to a close, Deadline’s film critics have each chosen their Top 3 international movies of the year. A trio of those selected recently made the International Feature Oscar shortlist — though not all titles below were put forth by their country of origin.
Overall, as Deadline’s Awards Columnist and Chief Film Critic Pete Hammond notes, “There was an exceptional list to choose from.” His Top 3 all began their careers at the Cannes Film Festival, “another reason that iconic French fest sets the table for cinema for the rest of the year,” he says.
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Along with Cannes, debuts at the Berlin, Venice and Toronto festivals are also represented below.
Here are the top international films of 2024, according to Hammond, Damon Wise and Stephanie Bunbury, based on their respected individual opinions and listed in alphabetical order under their names.
PETE HAMMOND’S PICKS
The Count Of Monte-Cristo
The latest of many versions of the classic Alexandre Dumas story, The Count of Monte-Cristo (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo) premiered out of competition at Cannes to a massive standing ovation and reception, and why not? This lavish, sumptuously produced three-hour epic is riveting from start to finish. Coming from the screenwriting and now directing team of Alexandre de la Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte, who recently did similar treatment to Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, this thrilling tale of a man who escapes after being wrongly imprisoned for 14 years to exact revenge on those who put him there is the stuff great adventure movies are made of, and this one with a terrific lead performance by Pierre Niney as Edmund Dantes aka Count of Monte-Cristo fills the bill and more.
Click for Deadline’s The Count of Monte-Cristo review
Emilia Pérez
A true international sensation after its Cannes debut brought it prizes for its four female leads, as well as a Jury Prize for director Jacques Audiard, the Spanish-language French entry for Best International Film at the Academy Awards, simply dazzles in every single respect, most notably as a musical like no other. Featuring astounding performances from Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Salda?a, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz who all shared the Cannes honor, this story of a drug cartel boss who decides to change his life and his gender is perhaps the most original film you will see all year, and even on its second viewing it only gets better.
Click for Deadline’s Emilia Pérez review
Flow
The Latvian entry for Best International Feature Film is, in a very good year for feature animation, the most haunting and memorable animated movie I saw this year. Premiering in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, it has swept critics honors for animated feature, but it goes way beyond that categorization with a story that has genuine resonance for where we are in the world right now. It is the story of a cat who survives a disastrous flood, and then as his community is sinking, teams up with a group of four other of God’s creatures in an effort to survive and to learn to live together despite their differences. Coming from animation genius Gints Zilbalodis, this gorgeously animated adventure will live in your hearts long after seeing it.
Click for Deadline’s Flow review
DAMON WISE’S PICKS
April
Given the largely commercial arthouse lineup at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April was the deep dive, and in any other year might have come away with more than the Special Jury Prize. Ostensibly an abortion drama, a genre that traditionally sends distributors running screaming to the hills, Kulumbegashvili’s film is a sophisticated portrait of a very complicated woman, an experienced obstetrician on trial after one of her patients loses her unborn child. The shadow of Michael Haneke lurks in every corner of its immaculate but knowingly enigmatic compositions.
Bring Them Down
Christopher Andrews’ rural Irish thriller takes some getting used to, partly because it appears to find Wolf Man star Christopher Abbott speaking better Gaelic than co-star Colm Meaney, but mostly because its fractured storytelling withholds key information until around the halfway mark. After that point, Bring Them Down is off to the races, revealing itself as a gripping, bloody turf war-slash-Western, played out between Abbott’s shepherd and his duplicitous young neighbor. The latter role is a gift for Barry Keoghan, whose shiftiness creates a mood of its own in the film’s tense, violent third act.
Loveable
From Norway, Lilja Ingolfsdottir’s heart-wrenching deconstruction of a suburban couple makes Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story look like a Pixar comedy by comparison. Key to its success is Helga Guren as Maria, a 40-year-old divorcee having second thoughts some seven years into her new relationship. Told entirely from Maria’s perspective, even when her own testimony makes her more than a little unlikeable, Loveable is a showcase for Guren’s incredible talent; vacillating between tough and vulnerable, she puts everything she’s got onscreen in a beautifully messy outpouring of inchoate emotion.
STEPHANIE BUNBURY’S PICKS
Dahomey
Dahomey was the West African kingdom that is now called Benin, where the French invaded in 1890 and, among other outrages, took 7,000 artworks back to France. In 2020, 26 of them were returned to a newly created museum in Porto-Novo that uncannily resembles the Musée Branly in Paris, where they had been stored for a century. Mati Diop reflects on that cultural exchange while detailing on screen the process of packing and preserving the work; she also gives voice to Behanzin, a statue of a former king – who grew rich on slave-trading – now come to stiff, woody life. An intellectually dense film bursting with ideas, some of them contradictory, some troubling, all of them provocative.
Click for Deadline’s Dahomey review
My Favourite Cake
A sweetly subversive romance from Iran, where small pleasures like a walk in the park with a gentleman are denied even to a respectable septuagenarian like Mahin (Lily Farhadpour). In her autumnal years, however, she takes life by the horns; hearing a friendly taxi driver (Esmail Mehrabi) say he has nobody at home to cook for him, she invites him to dinner, unafraid of the law or of seeming ridiculous. They drink wine, he stays the night, they are on the road to ruin. Directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha let their story unfold with the simple charm of a rom-com, but there is no mistaking its campaigning fervor.
When Fall Is Coming
In her cottage in Burgundy, where the leaves are turning russet and the woods studded with wild mushrooms are full of wild fruits, elderly Michelle (Hélène Vincent) tends her garden, goes to church and supports her best friend (Josiane Balasko), whose son is in prison. French director Fran?ois Ozon is at his most elegantly slippery here — however, anyone, even an ostensibly virtuous grandmother, may harbor secrets and desires too dark to name. Vincent, with her beautifully aged face, is quietly mesmerizing; Ludivine Sagnier, as her hostile daughter, an absolute firebrand. Ultimately, this is a wistful but unsentimental meditation on families: how they fail us and how, with love, they might be rebuilt.
Click for Deadline’s When Fall is Coming review
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