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Justin Chang, film critic for NPR's Fresh Air and The New Yorker chooses his favorite film of the year, along with 10 others.
Which movies made the cut? From a dark comedy where a "facially unique" New Yorker who gets a miraculous chance to inhabit someone else's skin to a detective story from a Spanish director - his first in 30 years - Chang's list spans genres from directors from across the globe.
Read on for a list of movies to binge as 2024 comes to an end . . .
It's often said that December for film critics is like tax season for accountants. This is our crunch time, when we attempt to take stock of the past 12 months' worth of movies and determine our favorites, individually and collectively.
Earlier this month, the New York Film Critics Circle gave its best picture award to The Brutalist, Brady Corbet's sweeping drama about a Hungarian-born architect's postwar American rebirth. A few days later, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, of which I'm a member, gave its top prize to Anora, Sean Baker's madly entertaining farce about a Brooklyn sex worker.
It says something about the quality of the movies this year that, as much as I like Anora and The Brutalist, both titles landed just outside my own personal list of favorites. Here, then, are the 10 — no, 11 — best movies of 2024.
It's been more than 50 years since the legendary Víctor Erice made one of the greatest of all Spanish films, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). Since then, he's directed only three features, the latest of which comes after a roughly three-decade absence from the director's chair.
Both elegiac and quietly rapturous, Close Your Eyes begins as a kind of cinephile detective story, with a streak of meta: The protagonist (played by Manolo Solo) is himself a long-retired filmmaker, trying to solve the mystery of an old friend and former actor who vanished years earlier. By its transcendent final scenes, this absorbing drama has movingly affirmed the power of love, the inevitability of loss and the consoling pleasures of getting lost in the movies.
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World and Evil Does Not Exist
In Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, an invigoratingly foul-mouthed dark comedy from the Romanian director Radu Jude, the astonishing Ilinca Manolache plays a production assistant working inhuman hours on a corporate video promoting — wait for it — workplace safety. In Evil Does Not Exist, a quietly haunting drama from the Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car), a proposed glamping site threatens the environmental peace of a woodsy Japanese town. The consequences of unchecked corporate greed are in full, awful view; so are the killer instincts of two of the best, most fiercely original filmmakers working today.
Nickel Boys and A Different Man
These are two most daringly inventive American movies of the year, both of which ingeniously upend our usual notions of empathy and identification. In his wrenching adaptation of Colson Whitehead's 2019 novel, Nickel Boys, the writer-director RaMell Ross employs a first-person camera that puts us inside the heads of his protagonists, two Black boys enduring juvenile incarceration in Jim Crow-era Florida. In Aaron Schimberg's squirmingly original and provocative A Different Man, Sebastian Stan plays a "facially unique" New Yorker who gets a miraculous chance to inhabit someone else's skin — only to find that he still cannot escape his own.
La Chimera and Music
Two enchanting, achingly romantic dramas put a revivifying spin on ancient myth. Josh O'Connor plays a grubbily charismatic modern-day Orpheus in the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera, a tale of lost tombs and grave robbers that might as well have been titled Plunder the Tuscan Sun. Meanwhile, with Music, the German director Angela Schanelec weaves an enigmatic puzzle rooted in the story of Oedipus Rex — a tragedy that, in this sui generis telling, loses nearly all its narrative footholds but none of its shattering power.
No Other Land and Green Border
Two searing films — one nonfiction, one fiction — look unflinchingly into horror. Still without a U.S. distributor, despite having racked up numerous 2024 festival and critics' prizes, the documentary No Other Land is the work of four filmmakers — two Palestinian, two Israeli — who bravely documented the Israeli government's demolition of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank. The intensely harrowing drama Green Border, from the Polish director Agnieszka Holland, embroils us in the chaos at the Polish-Belarusian border, where refugees, soldiers and human-rights activists find themselves locked in an agonizing geopolitical limbo.
All We Imagine as Light and Hard Truths
The Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia won the Grand Prix at Cannes for All We Imagine as Light, a quietly shimmering drama about three Mumbai women, all of them chafing, in their own way, against gendered expectations. No less attuned to the ties that bind women, and equally rigorous in his pursuit of realism, the veteran English filmmaker Mike Leigh gave us a pared-to-the-bone drama with Hard Truths, featuring Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin (both alums of his 1996 triumph, Secrets & Lies) in two of the year's finest performances.
Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit npr.org.
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A federal judge in San Francisco said today that the government's ban on Anthropic looked like punishment after the AI company went public with its dispute with the Pentagon over the military's potential uses of its artificial intelligence model, Claude.
About the ruling: U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin made the remark at the outset of a hearing about Anthropic's request for a preliminary injunction in one of its lawsuits against the Pentagon, which has designated the company a supply chain risk, effectively blacklisting it.
The backstory: Anthropic has filed two federal lawsuits alleging that this designation amounts to illegal retaliation against the company for its stance on AI safety. It argues that the label will cost it both customers and revenue, since it will bar Pentagon contractors from doing business with the company, as well.
A federal judge in San Francisco said on Tuesday the government's ban on Anthropic looked like punishment after the AI company went public with its dispute with the Pentagon over the military's potential uses of its artificial intelligence model, Claude.
U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin made the remark at the outset of a hearing about Anthropic's request for a preliminary injunction in one of its lawsuits against the Pentagon, which has designated the company a supply chain risk, effectively blacklisting it.
"It looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic," Lin said, adding she was concerned that the government might be punishing Anthropic for openly criticizing the government's position.
Lin said she expected to make a ruling in the next few days on whether to temporarily pause the government's ban until the court decides on the merits of the case.
The hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is the latest development in a spat between one of the leading AI companies and the Trump administration, and it has implications for how the government can use AI more broadly.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced in late February that he would not allow the company's Claude's AI model to be used for autonomous weapons, or to surveil American citizens. President Trump subsequently ordered all U.S. government agencies to stop using Anthropic's products.
The Pentagon designated Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" earlier this month, citing national security concerns. That designation is normally reserved for entities deemed to be foreign adversaries that could potentially sabotage U.S. interests.
Anthropic has filed two federal lawsuits alleging that this designation amounts to illegal retaliation against the company for its stance on AI safety. It argues that the label will cost it both customers and revenue, since it will bar Pentagon contractors from doing business with the company, as well.
The lawsuits, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., allege the Trump administration violated the company's First Amendment right to speech and exceeded the scope of supply chain risk law.
In Tuesday's hearing, lawyers for Anthropic said it was apparently the first time such a designation had been made against a U.S. company.
Lin said the Pentagon has a right to decide what AI products it wants to use. But she questioned whether the government broke the law when it banned its agencies from using Anthropic, and when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that anyone seeking business with the Pentagon must cut relations with Anthropic.
She said the actions were "troubling" because they did not seem to be tailored to the national security concerns in question, which could be addressed by the Pentagon simply ceasing to use Claude. Instead, she said, it looked like the government was trying to punish Anthropic.
But a lawyer for the government argued that its actions were not retaliatory, and were based on Anthropic's disagreement with the government over how its AI model could be used — not the company's decision to speak out about it.
The government also argued that Anthropic is a risk because, theoretically, in the future the company could update Claude in a way that endangers national security.
Anthropic did not respond immediately to an emailed request for comment.
A Pentagon spokesperson said that the agency's policy is not to comment on ongoing litigation.
Copyright 2026 NPR
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An oil pipeline that was shut down after a 2015 environmental disaster is flowing again after President Donald Trump issued an executive order earlier this month. California mounted a legal fight against the pipeline this week. But environmentalists have won court rulings against the pipeline in recent years too.
The context: Before state Attorney General Rob Bonta filed his suit, the Environmental Defense Center, a nonprofit focused on Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, was already involved in its own ongoing lawsuit to keep the pipeline system shutdown. Last year, a judge granted the group a preliminary injunction to keep the pipeline closed.
Why it matters: “ It's a really dangerous project," said Linda Krop, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center. “It would not only cause harm to the environment, but it also threatens public health and safety and our local economy.”
Read on ... to learn more about the fight against the pipeline.
An oil pipeline that was shut down after a 2015 environmental disaster is flowing again after President Donald Trump issued an executive order earlier this month.
California mounted a legal fight against the pipeline this week. But environmentalists have won court rulings against the pipeline in recent years too.
Before state Attorney General Rob Bonta filed his suit, the Environmental Defense Center, a nonprofit focused on Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, was already involved in its own ongoing lawsuit to keep the pipeline system shutdown. Last year, a judge granted the group a preliminary injunction to keep the pipeline closed.
“ It's a really dangerous project," said Linda Krop, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center. “It would not only cause harm to the environment, but it also threatens public health and safety and our local economy.”
The pipeline runs through Gaviota State Park, known for its natural beauty and coastal biodiversity.
The 2015 Refugio Oil Spill released more than 123,000 gallons of crude into the waters off Santa Barbara’s Gaviota Coast, killing hundreds of birds and other wildlife, and spreading more than a hundred miles south into Los Angeles.
The Santa Ynez offshore oil platform and Las Flores Pipeline System responsible for the spill (then operated by Exxon) were shuttered — until the federal government ordered it to restart earlier this month, citing emergency powers and an energy crisis caused by the war in Iran.
California regulators previously ruled that the company now operating the pipeline, Sable Offshore Corp., based in Houston, had to repair the pipeline system before operations could resume.
Krop said the federal government agreed in 2016 that the California fire marshal would have jurisdiction over the pipeline’s safety. And in 2020, she said, a court ruled that only the state could approve restarting the system — an agreement the federal government signed.
“It's not proper for the Trump administration or the secretary of energy to override a court order,” Krop said.
Now, the legal battle will be over who is in charge: the California fire marshal or the Department of Energy as ordered by Trump?
The Department of Energy did not respond to LAist’s request for comment.
Krop told LAist that Californians should be concerned from both an environmental and a constitutional perspective.
“This is not just about Sable. This is about a constitutional crisis,” Krop said. “This is going to be the new precedent. … If they care about the ability of states to enforce their own laws, if they're worried about State Parks saying what can happen within their boundaries, then they should care about this.”
In a statement, Sable said the the federal intervention was “to address the energy scarcity and supply disruption risks caused by California policies that have left the region and U.S. military forces dependent on foreign oil.”
The U.S. is a net exporter of oil, though the global oil market’s complexity means that what is produced here doesn’t necessarily stay in the U.S.
Krop took issue with the characterization of an energy crisis to begin with, a sentiment shared by Bonta and other Democratic leaders in California.
Krop also challenged the assertion that restarting the pipeline would help lower gas prices.
“Gas prices are set on a global market, and right now they're influenced by what's happening in Iran and the war. This project will not make a bit of difference with gas prices,” Krop said. “People don't realize probably oil from this project, it's very heavy, low quality crude oil. There's not any guarantee that it's going to even make it to the gas pump.”
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A New Mexico jury decided today that Meta knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms, a verdict that signals a changing tide against tech companies and the government's willingness to crack down.
Why now? The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial, and as jurors in a federal court in California have been sequestered in deliberations for more than a week about whether Meta and YouTube should be liable in a similar case.
About the verdict: New Mexico jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety.
How much does Meta owe? Jurors found there were thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million. That's less than one-fifth of what prosecutors were seeking. Meta is valued at about $1.5 trillion.
Read on... for more on the case and its implications.
SANTA FE, N.M. — A New Mexico jury decided Tuesday that Meta knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms, a verdict that signals a changing tide against tech companies and the government's willingness to crack down.
The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial, and as jurors in a federal court in California have been sequestered in deliberations for more than a week about whether Meta and YouTube should be liable in a similar case.
New Mexico jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety. The jury determined Meta violated parts of the state's Unfair Practices Act on accusations the company hid what it knew about about the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms and impacts on child mental health.
The jury agreed with allegations that Meta made false or misleading statements and also agreed that Meta engaged in "unconscionable" trade practices that unfairly took advantage of the vulnerabilities of and inexperience of children.
Jurors found there were thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million. That's less than one-fifth of what prosecutors were seeking.
Meta is valued at about $1.5 trillion. The company's stock was up 5% in early after-hours trading following the verdict, a signal that shareholders were shrugging off the news and its potential impact on the company's business.
The social media conglomerate won't be forced to change its practices right away. It will be up to a judge — not a jury — to determine whether Meta's social media platforms created a public nuisance and whether the company should pay for public programs to address the harms. That second phase of the trial will happen in May.
A Meta spokesperson said the company disagrees with the verdict and will appeal.
"We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and are clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors or harmful content," the spokesperson said. "We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online."
Attorneys for Meta said the company discloses risks and makes efforts to weed out harmful content and experiences, while acknowledging that some bad material gets through its safety net.
New Mexico's case was among the first to reach trial in a wave of litigation involving social media platforms and their impacts on children.
The trial that started Feb. 9. is one of the first in a torrent of lawsuits against Meta and comes as school districts and legislators want more restrictions on the use of smartphones in classrooms.
More than 40 state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against Meta, claiming it's contributing to a mental health crisis among young people by deliberately designing Instagram and Facebook features that are addictive.
"Meta's house of cards is beginning to fall," said Sacha Haworth, executive director of watchdog group The Tech Oversight Project. "For years, it's been glaringly obvious that Meta has failed to stop sexual predators from turning online interactions into real world harm."
Haworth pointed to whistleblowers like Arturo Bejar, as well as unsealed documents and other evidence, saying it painted a damning picture.
New Mexico's case relied on a state undercover investigation where agents created social media accounts posing as children to document sexual solicitations and Meta's response.
The lawsuit, filed in 2023 by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, also says Meta hasn't fully disclosed or addressed the dangers of social media addiction. Meta hasn't agreed that social media addiction exists, but executives at trial acknowledged "problematic use" and say they want people to feel good about the time they spend on Meta's platforms.
"Evidence shows not only that Meta invests in safety because it's the right thing to do but because it is good for business," Meta attorney Kevin Huff told jurors in closing arguments. "Meta designs its apps to help people connect with friends and family, not to try to connect predators."
Tech companies have been protected from liability for material posted on their social media platforms under Section 230, a 30-year-old provision of the U.S. Communications Decency Act, as well as a First Amendment shield.
New Mexico prosecutors say Meta still should be responsible for its role in pushing out that content through complex algorithms that proliferate material that can be harmful for children.
"We know the output is meant to be engagement and time spent for kids," prosecution attorney Linda Singer said. "That choice that Meta made has profound negative impacts on kids."
The New Mexico trial examined a raft of Meta's internal correspondence and reports related to child safety. Jurors also heard testimony from Meta executives, platform engineers, whistleblowers who left the company, psychiatric experts and tech-safety consultants.
The jury also heard testimony from local public school educators who struggled with disruptions linked to social media, including sextortion schemes targeting children.
In reaching a verdict, the jury considered whether social media users were misled by specific statements about platform safety by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Meta global head of safety Antigone Davis.
In deliberations, the jury used a checklist of allegations from prosecutors that Meta failed to disclose what it knew about problems with enforcing its ban on users under 13, the prevalence of social media content about teen suicide, the role of Meta algorithms in prioritizing sensational or harmful content, and more.
Juror Linda Payton, 38, said the jury reached a compromise on the estimated number of teenagers affected by Meta's platforms, while opting for the maximum penalty per violation. With a maximum $5,000 penalty for each violation, she said she thought each child was worth the maximum amount.
ParentsSOS, a coalition of families who have lost children to harm caused by social media, called the verdict a "watershed moment."
"We parents who have experienced the unimaginable — the death of a child because of social media harms — applaud this rare and momentous milestone in the years-long fight to hold Big Tech accountable for the dangers their products pose to our kids," the group said in a statement.
Copyright 2026 NPR
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Delta Airlines is pausing special services that make flights more convenient and efficient for members of Congress, as first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Why now: "Due to the impact on resources from the longstanding government shutdown, Delta will temporarily suspend specialty services to members of Congress flying Delta," the airline said in a statement to NPR. "Next to safety, Delta's no. 1 priority is taking care of our people and customers, which has become increasingly difficult in the current environment."
What it means in practice: Specialty services include airport escorts and other red coat services. Delta said lawmakers will be treated like any other passenger based on their SkyMiles status. This comes a week after Delta CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC he's "outraged" by the ongoing shutdown, which has led to TSA officers working without pay.
Members of Congress are now facing a personal consequence from the ongoing shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security: losing one special flight perk.
Delta Airlines is pausing special services that make flights more convenient and efficient for members of Congress, as first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"Due to the impact on resources from the longstanding government shutdown, Delta will temporarily suspend specialty services to members of Congress flying Delta," the airline said in a statement to NPR. "Next to safety, Delta's no. 1 priority is taking care of our people and customers, which has become increasingly difficult in the current environment."
Specialty services include airport escorts and other red coat services. Delta said lawmakers will be treated like any other passenger based on their SkyMiles status.
This comes a week after Delta CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC he's "outraged" by the ongoing shutdown, which has led to TSA officers working without pay.
"It's inexcusable that our security agents, our frontline agents, that are essential to what we do, are not being paid, and it's ridiculous to see them being used as political chips," he said.
The Department of Homeland Security, which includes TSA, has been in a partial shutdown since mid-February.
The shutdown means TSA officers are working without pay, and has led to widespread staff shortages and long wait times for travelers.
Other major airlines did not respond to NPR about imminent changes to their specialty services. A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines told NPR the airline "continues to engage with our federal partners and joins the airline industry in urging Congress to fund the TSA and CBP without further delay."
In the wake of the killing of two U.S. citizens by immigration enforcement officers in Minneapolis, Congressional Democrats said they wouldn't vote to fund DHS until changes — specifically for Immigration and Customs Enforcement — were put into place.
Senate Democrats and the White House have been trading proposals back and forth for weeks, with little progress.
Democrats have pushed to fund DHS with carveouts to not fund ICE and CBP to alleviate the TSA pain points as negotiations continue
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Saturday that Democrats are having "productive conversations" on ICE reforms but that it's an ongoing process "that should not get in the way of funding our TSA workers."
"Let's keep negotiating the outstanding issues with ICE while sending paychecks to TSA workers now," Schumer said. "Let us end those long lines at the airport now. This is the logical, expedient, correct thing to do."
Republicans thus far have objected to votes on those proposals, pressing to fund the entire department.
Last week, a bill from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, to prohibit preferential screening at airports for members of Congress cleared the Senate. It has not yet been taken up by the House of Representatives.
Copyright 2026 NPR
