Best A24 Movies Ranked: The Essential Tier
These are the movies that define why A24 matters. Each one would be impossible to imagine coming from a major studio. They take risks that paid off completely, and several of them have already become the kind of movies that get referenced in conversations about the best of the decade.
Hereditary
A family begins to unravel after the death of their secretive grandmother. Toni Collette gives one of the most committed horror performances ever put on screen, and the movie earns every second of its dread before delivering one of the most shocking sequences in recent memory.
Ari Aster's debut treats grief as the actual horror, with the supernatural elements functioning as an amplifier rather than the point. The attic scene. The telephone pole. The dinner table. This is a movie that stays with you in specific images that refuse to leave.
Watch it alone, at night, with the volume up. The sound design is doing half the work.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
Everything Everywhere All at Once
A Chinese-American laundromat owner discovers she can access the skills and memories of her alternate selves across the multiverse, and must use this ability to save every universe from destruction. The plot description makes it sound exhausting. It is the opposite: funny, chaotic, and genuinely devastating by the final act.
Michelle Yeoh is extraordinary. The Daniels throw every idea they have at the screen, and somehow almost all of it works. This won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and deserved all of them. It is the rare blockbuster-scale movie with an actual emotional argument at its center.
Give it twenty minutes before you decide if it is for you. The opening act is deliberately overwhelming and the payoff is worth it.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
Midsommar
A young woman travels to a Swedish midsummer festival with her boyfriend and a group of his friends following a family tragedy. The horror happens almost entirely in bright sunshine, which makes it stranger and more effective than any conventional darkness could.
Aster structures the movie as a breakup story wearing a folk horror costume, and Florence Pugh's performance in the opening sequence alone is worth the full runtime. The director's cut at 171 minutes is the better version. It makes room for the relationship dynamics that justify the ending.
The director's cut adds nearly half an hour and is worth seeking out. The relationship between Dani and Christian needs that time to earn what happens to it.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
Moonlight
The story of a young Black man growing up in Miami across three chapters of his life: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Barry Jenkins shoots it with a closeness and tenderness that makes every scene feel private. Mahershala Ali won the Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in the first chapter alone.
This is the movie that announced A24 as a distributor capable of putting serious, formally ambitious work in front of a mainstream audience. It won Best Picture over La La Land. The mix-up at the ceremony was the most A24 moment imaginable: an underdog story winning in chaotic fashion.
Do not let the quiet pace fool you. The emotional accumulation in the final scene is one of the best pieces of understated acting in recent American cinema.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
The Witch
A Puritan family is banished from their New England plantation and forced to farm at the edge of a forest. Something in the woods begins to destroy them, one by one. Robert Eggers shot it using only natural light and period-accurate dialogue, and the result feels genuinely historical rather than costumed.
Anya Taylor-Joy's debut. The paranoia that builds between family members is more frightening than anything explicitly supernatural. The ending is one of the most committed pieces of filmmaking in the A24 catalogue: it fully commits to where its logic leads.
The Old English dialogue is easy to follow after the first ten minutes. Do not put subtitles on a modern translation, it removes the period texture entirely.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →Best A24 Movies Ranked: The Great Tier
These movies are not quite essential but would define the year they were released. Each one has at least one sequence or performance that has no equivalent anywhere else in mainstream cinema.
Lady Bird
A Sacramento teenager applies to colleges on the East Coast while fighting with her mother about everything. Greta Gerwig's directorial debut is so precise about the specific texture of that age and place that almost everyone who watches it finds something uncomfortably personal in it.
Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf play one of the best mother-daughter dynamics in recent American movies. The movie is funny and sharp and the last five minutes reframe everything that came before it without changing a single fact.
Pay attention to the driving scenes. The physical blocking in the car is doing a lot of work to show you who these two people are to each other.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
Minari
A Korean-American family moves to rural Arkansas in the 1980s to start a farm. The father wants to build something for the next generation. The family begins to fracture under the pressure. Youn Yuh-jung won the Supporting Actress Oscar for playing the grandmother, and the scenes between her and the youngest child are the heart of the movie.
Minari is a quiet movie about what it costs to chase a version of the American dream that was not designed with your family in mind. It does not overstate any of this. It just shows you, with patience and precision, what the weight of it looks like.
Watch it in Korean with subtitles even if you do not normally use them. The language switching between Korean and English is part of how the movie shows the family's internal fault lines.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
The Florida Project
A six-year-old girl spends her summer running wild around the motels near Disney World while her mother struggles to keep them housed. Sean Baker shoots it from child height, which gives the whole movie a sense of freedom and color that makes the poverty underneath it hit harder when the reality breaks through.
Willem Dafoe received an Oscar nomination for playing the motel manager and it is one of his career-best performances: warm and tired and decent in a way that feels completely unperformed. The final sequence is one of the most talked-about endings in recent independent cinema.
The ending divided audiences. It is the correct ending. Stick with it.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
Ex Machina
A programmer is invited to a remote research facility to administer a Turing test to an AI with a humanoid body. Alex Garland's directorial debut uses a three-character setup and a single location to ask questions about consciousness, manipulation, and gender that get more uncomfortable the longer the movie runs.
Alicia Vikander is extraordinary as Ava. The movie earns its ending because it has been completely honest about its characters the entire time. You just were not paying attention to the right person.
Rewatch the scenes between Caleb and Nathan after you know the ending. The subtext in every exchange is not subtle once you know where it is going.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
Climax
A French dance troupe's after-party goes catastrophically wrong when someone spikes the sangria with LSD. Shot in long unbroken takes, the movie spends its first half as an exhilarating portrait of young dancers at the top of their craft, and its second half as one of the most disorienting descents in horror.
This is not for everyone. The camera work in the final act is genuinely nauseating by design. But the dance sequences in the first half are some of the most purely cinematic things A24 has put its name on.
The credits run at the start, not the end. The movie begins immediately after them. Do not turn it off thinking it is over when the first title card appears.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →A24 does not make safe movies. They make movies that studios with shareholders would never greenlight, and that is precisely why the best of them are worth remembering.
Best A24 Movies Ranked: The Good Tier
These movies have real strengths and will reward the right audience. Each one is doing something that would not exist without A24's willingness to back unusual projects.
The Lighthouse
Two lighthouse keepers are stranded on a remote New England island in the 1890s and begin to lose their minds. Shot in black and white in a 1.19:1 aspect ratio that makes every frame feel like it is closing in on you. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson are both giving career performances, competing to out-commit each other in every scene.
This is a demanding movie. It is dense with maritime mythology, unreliable narration, and Old Testament imagery. It does not explain itself. If you are willing to spend time with it, it rewards that patience with one of the most formally audacious pieces of American independent filmmaking in years.
Read up on the Prometheus myth after watching. The movie's final image makes more sense with that context, though it works on pure sensation regardless.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
Eighth Grade
The last week of eighth grade for a socially anxious thirteen-year-old who posts self-help videos to YouTube while struggling to connect with anyone at school. Bo Burnham shot it with such precise understanding of that specific social anxiety that the movie is often physically uncomfortable to watch.
Elsie Fisher was fourteen during filming and gives one of the most unselfconscious performances from a young actor in recent memory. The pool party sequence is one of the most accurate and most agonizing things the movie does.
Do not watch this with your parents in the room. Several scenes are designed to be painful specifically because someone might be watching you react to them.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
Uncut Gems
A New York jeweler with a gambling problem stakes everything on a series of increasingly desperate bets while everyone in his life is simultaneously in crisis. Adam Sandler gives the best performance of his career and it is not particularly close. The Safdie Brothers make the anxiety physical: the score, the overlapping dialogue, and the editing combine to make two hours feel like a prolonged panic attack.
This is an exhausting movie in the best possible sense. It never lets you breathe. The ending is one of the most polarizing finales in recent A24 history, but it is the only ending this particular story could have.
Commit to it. The first twenty minutes are deliberately overwhelming. If you can get through the opal sequence at the start, you are locked in for the rest.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
The Lobster
In a near-future society, single people are sent to a hotel and given 45 days to find a romantic partner or be transformed into an animal of their choosing. Colin Farrell has never been better used: his flat, defeated affect is exactly what the movie's deadpan satirical register demands.
Lanthimos uses the absurd premise to say something precise about how society pathologizes being alone and the violence done to people in the name of couplehood. The movie is very funny in a way that makes you feel slightly bad about laughing.
Do not expect the second half to match the first half's tone. The shift is intentional and part of the argument the movie is making.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →
Waves
A Florida family fractures after a tragedy involving their teenage son. The movie is split into two halves with different protagonists, and the second half reframes everything the first half established. Trey Edward Shults shoots it with handheld intensity and uses music as a structural device in ways most directors do not attempt.
This is an underrated entry in the A24 catalogue. It did not get the attention of Moonlight or Hereditary but it is doing something formally and emotionally comparable. The second half is one of the most moving things the studio has released.
Stick with the second half even if the first half unsettles you. The movie is deliberately designed so that your feelings change as the perspective changes.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →- The Witch (2015) Start with Eggers. Sets the tone for what A24 horror can do.
- Moonlight (2016) The dramatic anchor. Shows A24's range beyond genre.
- Hereditary (2018) The horror peak. Best watched after your nerves have recovered.
- Midsommar (2019) The daylight follow-up. More unsettling in ways you will not expect.
- Uncut Gems (2019) A palette cleanser of pure anxiety. Different register entirely.
- Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) End here. The studio's biggest swing and its most complete achievement.