The 10 Best A24 Films, Ranked

Celine Song's debut feature follows Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), childhood friends in Seoul who are separated when Nora's family emigrates to Canada. Twenty-four years later, after living entire adult lives apart, they meet again in New York, where Nora is married to Arthur (John Magaro).

It is one of the quietest, most precisely emotional films in A24's catalog. Song wrote it about her own life. Lee gives a performance entirely composed of restraint — every important emotion is something she does not say. The final ten minutes, set on a Manhattan sidewalk and in front of a bar, contain some of the most devastating filmmaking of the decade.

Past Lives was nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. It won neither. It will outlast almost everything that beat it.

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Alex Garland's directorial debut, in which a young programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) is invited to the remote estate of his tech-CEO boss (Oscar Isaac) to administer a Turing test on an AI named Ava (Alicia Vikander). The film unfolds across seven sessions over seven days. It's structurally a chamber piece. It's thematically a horror film about what happens when men build women.

When Ex Machina came out in 2014, the AI angle felt speculative. Eleven years later, it reads like a documentary. Isaac's Nathan is one of the great villain performances of the 2010s — a tech bro who has talked himself into the morality of his project so thoroughly that he can't see what he is. Vikander won an Oscar later for The Danish Girl. She probably should have won it for this.

The disco scene alone earns the film a permanent place on this list.

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The Safdie brothers' anxiety-inducing crime drama about Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a Diamond District jeweler with a gambling problem, an extramarital affair, a black opal he's trying to auction to Kevin Garnett, and an escalating list of people he owes money to. The film moves at the speed of a panic attack and never lets up.

Sandler should have been nominated for an Oscar. He wasn't. The performance is the best of his career and one of the great pieces of acting in any 2010s film, full stop. The Safdies (now working separately) are the most kinetic American filmmakers of their generation, and Uncut Gems is their most fully realized work.

The ending is one of the most upsetting and inevitable in modern cinema. You will think about it for weeks.

Watch on Netflix.

Ari Aster's bright-daylight folk-horror film, set in a Swedish midsummer commune that turns out to be exactly as troubling as it looks. Florence Pugh plays Dani, a grief-stricken graduate student whose deteriorating relationship with her boyfriend (Jack Reynor) is the actual subject of the film. The cult is the metaphor.

A24 horror has a specific signature — slow, atmospheric, more interested in dread than in jumps — and Midsommar is the form in its purest version. Pugh's performance gave her a career. The film's set design (those flowers, those buildings, that dance) is some of the most distinctive production work A24 has ever financed.

It's also longer and meaner than most viewers expect. The director's cut runs three hours. It's worth the time.

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Sean Baker's portrait of childhood in the budget motels along the highways outside Disney World. Brooklynn Prince plays Moonee, a six-year-old who lives with her young mother (Bria Vinaite) at the lavender-painted Magic Castle Inn, just down the road from the actual Magic Kingdom. Willem Dafoe plays the motel manager, in an Oscar-nominated performance that's somehow underrated.

What makes The Florida Project devastating is the choice to film almost entirely from Moonee's perspective. The audience is forced to experience poverty and instability the way a child experiences them — as a series of small adventures that occasionally become very scary for reasons the child doesn't fully understand. The final shot, filmed on an iPhone, is one of the most discussed endings of the last decade.

Baker would later win Best Picture for Anora. The Florida Project is the better film.

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Brady Corbet's three-and-a-half-hour epic about a Hungarian Jewish architect named László Tóth (Adrien Brody) who survives the Holocaust, immigrates to Pennsylvania, and is hired by a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce) to design a community center on a hillside. The film has a 15-minute intermission. It earns it.

Brody won his second Best Actor Oscar for this. The film won three Oscars total. Corbet shot it in VistaVision, the wide-frame process used in Vertigo and The Searchers, on a budget of less than $10 million. It looks like a film three times its budget.

The Brutalist is the most ambitious film A24 has ever financed. It is also a deeply patient one. Most viewers will watch the first half, take the intermission, and come back. The second half is even more devastating than the first.

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Ari Aster's debut feature, in which a family processes the death of an estranged grandmother and discovers that the grandmother left them with much more than grief. Toni Collette gives one of the most committed pieces of acting in any horror film of the century — a performance the Academy refused to nominate, which remains one of the worst snubs in recent Oscar history.

Hereditary is the film that established the A24 horror brand as something distinct from genre-mill output. It's a family drama that becomes a horror film, and the horror is genuinely upsetting in ways most studio horror won't try. The dinner scene. The treehouse. The nodding. Anyone who has seen it remembers exactly what we mean.

Aster has gone on to make weirder, more divisive films. Hereditary remains his most controlled.

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Greta Gerwig's directorial debut, about a Sacramento teenager (Saoirse Ronan) navigating her senior year of Catholic high school and her complicated relationship with her mother (Laurie Metcalf). The film was nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. It won zero.

It is a perfect movie. There isn't a wasted scene in 94 minutes. Ronan's performance is the kind of work most actors don't get to do until midcareer. Metcalf, as the mother, gives the film its real spine — a parent who loves her daughter and cannot say it directly, who is also exhausted by her daughter and cannot say that either.

Gerwig went on to make Little Women and Barbie. She has never made a film better than Lady Bird. Few people have.

Watch on Netflix.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's multiverse maximalist comedy-drama about a middle-aged Chinese American immigrant (Michelle Yeoh) running a failing laundromat, getting audited by the IRS, watching her marriage fall apart, and discovering she is the only version of herself in the multiverse capable of saving every other version of herself. The film is funny, devastating, kind, profane, and operates in roughly a dozen tonal registers.

It won seven Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress (Yeoh), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis), and Best Film Editing. It is the highest-grossing film A24 has ever distributed.

The film's reputation has only grown since. It's the rare Best Picture winner that critics and general audiences both rank among their actual favorites. The hot dog fingers sequence. The rocks. Quan's performance. The kindness underneath everything. It's a film that made a lot of people who had never cried in a theater cry in a theater.

Watch on Showtime via Paramount+ or rent for $3.99.

Barry Jenkins's three-act portrait of a Black queer kid named Chiron — played by Alex Hibbert as a child, Ashton Sanders as a teenager, and Trevante Rhodes as an adult — growing up in 1980s Miami. Mahershala Ali gives a Best Supporting Actor-winning performance as a drug dealer who briefly serves as Chiron's father figure. Naomie Harris plays Chiron's mother.

Moonlight won Best Picture in 2017 in one of the most chaotic award-show moments of the century. The film deserved the award without the chaos. It is one of the most formally precise American films of the last twenty years. Every frame is deliberate. The score is heartbreaking. The casting of three actors as the same character at different ages is the kind of choice that should fail and somehow doesn't.

A24 distributed Moonlight in 2016 and the company's brand identity solidified within months. The reason A24 is a brand at all — the reason a viewer will buy a ticket because of the logo — starts here. Jenkins made a film that proved a small, specific, formally adventurous American movie could win Best Picture without lying about what it was.

This is the best A24 film. It might also be the best American film of the last decade.

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