The Best A24 Movies: 14 Films That Explain Why the Studio Matters

1.Moonlight (2016)

• 1h 51m
• TMDB 7.4/10
• Drama

Barry Jenkins's film is the best thing the company has ever released and one of the best American films of the century. Three chapters, three actors playing Chiron at three ages, and a story about a boy in Miami learning what he is allowed to want.

James Laxton's cinematography does something unusual: it shoots Black skin with a deliberate luminosity that mainstream film stock and lighting practice had historically failed at, and the effect is immediately visible. The famous swimming lesson sequence is shot like a baptism because it is one.

What makes it great rather than merely good is the restraint. There is no speech where anyone explains themselves. The final scene is two men in a kitchen, and almost nothing is said, and it lands harder than any monologue could.

At 111 minutes it is also perfectly sized. It won Best Picture in the most chaotic ceremony in Oscar history, which slightly obscured the fact that it deserved it easily.

Watch it if: you want the single best film in the catalog and one of the great American dramas.

2.Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

• 2h 20m
• TMDB 7.7/10
• Action, Adventure, Science Fiction

The Daniels made a film about a laundromat owner being audited by the IRS, and turned it into a multiverse action comedy, a martial arts film, a mother-daughter drama, and a genuine argument about nihilism. It should not work. It works completely.

The technical achievement is staggering given the budget: roughly 25 million dollars, with a visual effects team of about eight people, several of whom learned the software during production. Compare that to any studio multiverse film of the same period.

Michelle Yeoh finally got a role that used everything she can do, and Ke Huy Quan's return after two decades away is the emotional core of the film. The hot dog fingers universe is the part everyone quotes, but the film's actual thesis, delivered on a rock with googly eyes, is one of the most sincere things in modern cinema.

Be aware that the first forty minutes are deliberately overwhelming. That is the design, not a flaw, and the film settles once it has established the rules.

Watch it if: you want maximalist chaos that turns out to be about being kind to your family.

3.Hereditary (2018)

• 2h 8m
• TMDB 7.3/10
• Horror, Mystery, Thriller

The film that made A24 synonymous with horror. Ari Aster's debut spends its first hour as a precise family drama about grief and blame, with Toni Collette giving a performance of frightening intensity, and then executes a midpoint turn that rearranges everything before it.

The craft is in the information management. Aster puts the answer on screen very early, in the background of ordinary domestic shots, and correctly bets that you will not see it. The rewatch is almost unbearable.

It is a genuinely upsetting film rather than a fun one. If you want to be scared without being disturbed, this is the wrong pick and The Conjuring is the right one.

Watch it if: you want the most effective horror film of the last decade and you are ready to feel bad.

4.The Zone of Interest (2023)

• 1h 45m
• TMDB 7.0/10
• Drama, History, War

The most formally radical film on this list. Jonathan Glazer made a film about the commandant of Auschwitz and his family living in a comfortable house next to the camp wall, and never once shows you the other side of the wall.

Everything you need is on the soundtrack, which was designed as a separate composition running underneath the domestic scenes: distant machinery, occasional shouting, a constant low industrial hum that the family has clearly stopped hearing. Johnnie Burn spent a year building it.

The cameras were hidden throughout the house and multiple were run simultaneously, so the actors performed without a crew present. The result feels less like a drama than surveillance footage of ordinary domestic life, which is precisely the argument the film is making.

It is 105 minutes and it is not remotely enjoyable. It is also one of the most important films of the decade.

Watch it if: you want to be confronted rather than entertained, and you can sit with discomfort.

5.Past Lives (2023)

• 1h 46m
• TMDB 7.7/10
• Drama, Romance

Celine Song's debut is the quietest film in the top five and the one most likely to leave you staring at a wall. Two childhood friends in Seoul are separated when one emigrates, reconnect online twelve years later, and finally meet in person twelve years after that.

The film's structure is its argument. By giving you three widely separated time periods it makes you feel the passage of twenty-four years rather than describing it, and the final act is essentially one long conversation between three people in a bar where almost nothing is said directly.

Nothing dramatic happens. Nobody betrays anyone. The film's entire tension is the gap between a life you are living and a life that stopped being available, and it refuses to resolve that into a lesson.

Watch it if: you want a romance that is honest about time, in 106 unhurried minutes.

6.Uncut Gems (2019)

• 2h 16m
• TMDB 7.2/10
• Drama, Thriller, Crime

The Safdie brothers made a 136-minute anxiety attack, and Adam Sandler gives the best performance of his career inside it. Howard Ratner is a Diamond District jeweller with a gambling problem and a plan that requires eleven separate things to go right in sequence.

The sound design deliberately layers overlapping dialogue so that multiple people are always talking over each other, which makes the film physically stressful to sit through. That is entirely intentional.

It is the most unpleasant good time on this list. Do not watch it if you are already stressed.

Watch it if: you want a film that raises your actual heart rate for two hours.

7.The Witch (2016)

• 1h 32m
• TMDB 7.0/10
• Horror, Drama, Mystery

Robert Eggers built 1630s New England from period court records and diaries, and wrote the dialogue in the English of the era. The horror comes from total immersion in a belief system: a family isolated in the woods who genuinely believe the devil is out there, with nothing to check that belief against.

At 92 minutes it is beautifully tight, and the ambiguity holds the whole way. You cannot tell whether this is supernatural or a family destroying itself, and the film keeps both alive until the last two minutes.

The period dialogue is genuinely difficult. Subtitles are not optional here.

Watch it if: you want the most atmospheric horror in the catalog.

8.Aftersun (2022)

• 1h 41m
• TMDB 7.6/10
• Drama

Charlotte Wells's debut looks like nothing: a father and his eleven-year-old daughter on a cheap holiday in Turkey, shot partly on camcorder footage. Then you slowly understand what the adult daughter is doing with these tapes and why.

Paul Mescal's performance works entirely in what he conceals, and the film never states the thing it is about. It simply lets you assemble it from a series of ordinary moments viewed from twenty years later.

The final sequence is one of the most devastating in recent film and it consists of a man walking through a door.

Watch it if: you want a quiet film that will take you apart very slowly.

9.The Lighthouse (2019)

• 1h 49m
• TMDB 7.5/10
• Drama, Fantasy, Thriller

Eggers again, this time with two lighthouse keepers on a rock in 1890s New England, shot in black and white in a boxy 1.19:1 aspect ratio that makes the frame feel like a coffin. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson spend 109 minutes descending into drunken paranoid madness.

It is a comedy, which nobody warns you about. Dafoe's flatulence and his extended curse about lobsters are played for laughs, and the film is much funnier than its reputation suggests.

It is also completely unhinged and offers no interpretation of itself. Take it as an experience rather than a puzzle.

Watch it if: you want two great actors screaming at each other on a rock, in glorious black and white.

10.Lady Bird (2017)

• 1h 34m
• TMDB 7.3/10
• Drama, Comedy

Greta Gerwig's solo directorial debut is the warmest film on this list and the most precisely observed. A high school senior in Sacramento in 2002 wants desperately to be somewhere else, and fights constantly with a mother who loves her and cannot stop criticizing her.

The screenplay's real skill is that it refuses to make anyone the villain. Laurie Metcalf's mother is exhausting and correct and wounded, often in the same scene, and the film gives her exactly as much sympathy as it gives its protagonist.

At 94 minutes it is one of the shortest films here and it does not waste thirty seconds.

Watch it if: you want a coming-of-age film that is funny, generous, and specific.