As much as theaters are humming right now, with ''Wicked'' and ''Moana 2" bringing moviegoers by the droves, it's been a fairly bruising movie year.
In between the blockbusters, though, the challenge of not just capturing the attention of audiences but of simply getting to the screen feels more perilous than ever. The year was marked by filmmakers who wagered everything from a $120 million pile ( Francis Ford Coppola's ''Megalopolis'' ) to their life (the dissident Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof's ''The Seed of the Sacred Fig").
Considering the paths of the ''The Apprentice'' (about Donald Trump's rise in New York) or the Israeli occupation documentary ''No Other Land'' (which still lacks a distributor), the question of what gets released was a common and chilling refrain.
That also made the movies that managed their way through — the ones that told urgent stories or dazzled with originality at a time of sequel stranglehold — all the more worth celebrating.
Here are The Associated Press' Film Writers Jake Coyle and Lindsey Bahr's picks for the best movies of 2024:
Jake Coyle's top movies of 2024
1. ''All We Imagine As Light''
Was this a great year for movies? The consensus seems to be no, and that may be true. But it did produce some stone-cold masterpieces, none more so than Payal Kapadia's sublime tale of three women in modern Mumbai. It's a grittily real movie graced, in equally parts, by keen-eyed documentary and dreamy poetry. Beguilingly, ''All We Imagine As Light'' grows more profound as it cleaves further from reality. In theaters.