The 15 Best A24 Films Ever Made, Ranked by What They Risked

No distributor has shaped the last decade of American cinema like A24, and none has been so thoroughly turned into a personality. It made its name buying strange films other companies would not touch, then started financing them, then won Best Picture twice over. What follows is not a ranking of vibes. We ranked these films on what each one risked and what it changed — the horror that rewired its genre, the domestic dramas that handed veteran actors the roles of their lives, the science fiction that still looks like nothing else.

Some are cult objects and some swept the Oscars; a few are still waiting for the audience they deserve. The order is best first, so the argument starts at the top and only gets louder from there — the real surprises, and the films people will fight hardest about, sit further down the list. Disagree freely. That is the point of a list like this.

1. Moonlight

Barry Jenkins turned a three-act coming-of-age story into something close to memory itself, and won Best Picture doing it. Moonlight is still the film that proved A24 could be tender rather than merely strange — a boy becoming a man across three actors and three chapters, each quieter and more devastating than the last. Nothing the company has released since has matched its combination of formal control and open heart.

2. Everything Everywhere All at Once

Daniels — Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — made maximalism carry real grief, which is the hardest trick in the book. Everything Everywhere All at Once won seven Oscars, Best Picture among them, for a multiverse comedy built around a laundromat tax audit, and gave Michelle Yeoh the role her career had spent four decades waiting for. It should have collapsed under its own noise; instead it kept finding a mother and daughter at the centre of every universe.

3. Hereditary

Ari Aster‘s debut reset what studio horror was allowed to be: grief first, dread second, jump scares almost never. Hereditary runs on Toni Collette‘s performance, the high-water mark of the modern genre, and on the slow realisation that the worst thing in the house is the family itself. A decade of imitators has not come close to the dinner-table scene.

4. The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer films a family’s comfortable domestic routine beside Auschwitz and lets the sound design carry the horror the camera refuses to show. The Zone of Interest is the most formally radical film A24 has released and the hardest to shake once it ends, precisely because it never once looks over the wall. The evil is all ambient, and that is the point.

5. Uncut Gems

The Safdie brothers weaponised anxiety into a two-hour panic attack and pulled a career performance out of Adam Sandler. Uncut Gems is the most physically exhausting thing on this list, a man digging his own hole with both hands and grinning all the way down. You do not so much watch it as survive it.

6. The Lighthouse

Robert Eggers shot in black-and-white on a boxy, almost square frame, wrote the dialogue out of nineteenth-century sailor diaries, and somehow made it funny. The Lighthouse hands Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson a two-hander that curdles from comedy into myth, all salt, drink, and bad weather. It is the rare film that gets stranger and more assured at the same time.

7. Lady Bird

Greta Gerwig‘s solo directorial debut is the most precisely observed mother-daughter film of its decade. Lady Bird is the one that made her a director studios would trust with a franchise, and it earns that trust in barely ninety minutes of Sacramento, first love, and small humiliations. Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf never hit a false note between them.

8. Ex Machina

Alex Garland’s chamber piece about an artificial intelligence and the coder sent to test it has aged into something close to documentary. Ex Machina won the visual-effects Oscar on a budget most blockbusters spend on catering, and it still asks the sharpest questions in the genre with three actors and a house. Alicia Vikander makes the machine more human than the men around her.

9. Past Lives

Celine Song’s first film gets more out of restraint than most directors manage with a full orchestra. Past Lives is a romance in which almost nothing happens and everything is at stake — two people and the lives they did not choose sitting quietly between them across two decades and an ocean. The final scene needs no dialogue at all.

10. Minari

Lee Isaac Chung’s Arkansas immigrant story is generous where it could easily have turned bitter. Minari gave Youn Yuh-jung an Oscar at seventy-three and turns a failing farm into one of the decade’s warmest films about family, without ever pretending the work is anything but hard. It earns its grace the slow way.

11. The Witch

Robert Eggers began both A24’s horror reputation and Anya Taylor-Joy’s career with a single farm on the edge of a wood. The Witch and its unbending period language made every folk-horror imitator that followed look loud and cheap by comparison. The dread here is patient, agricultural, and total.

12. Aftersun

Charlotte Wells built a debut out of camcorder footage and the things a father and daughter leave unsaid. Aftersun works entirely in the gap between what Paul Mescal‘s character shows his daughter and what he keeps from her, and it lands like a blow you only feel on the walk home. Almost nothing is stated; everything is felt.

13. Good Time

The Safdie brothers’ New York night-crawl is the film where Robert Pattinson stopped being a former teen idol and became one of his generation’s finest actors. Good Time never stops moving, one bad decision compounding into a worse one under sodium streetlight, and Pattinson holds the whole sprint together. It is a rush and an indictment at once.

14. Under the Skin

Jonathan Glazer put Scarlett Johansson in a van in Glasgow with hidden cameras and made the strangest science-fiction film of the century so far. Under the Skin arrived before anyone quite knew what an A24 film was, and it still feels beamed in from somewhere colder and further away. Mica Levi’s score does half the haunting.

15. Midsommar

Ari Aster disguised a breakup film as a folk-horror holiday and shot the whole thing in relentless daylight. Midsommar runs on Florence Pugh‘s grief; the cult, the flowers, and the famous final smile are almost incidental to it. Few films have made sunshine feel this threatening.

Plenty of strong work sits just off this list. The Florida Project, First Reformed, The Green Knight, The Farewell, A Ghost Story, Eighth Grade and Talk to Me would each anchor a lesser distributor’s whole catalogue, and the fact that they did not make the cut is the best argument for how deep this bench runs.

What holds the list together is not a house style — it is a house method. A24 keeps handing difficult films to the people who most want to make them, and then getting out of the way. That is why the range here runs from a silent Korean-American farm to a screaming Swedish meadow, and why the next great one is probably already shooting somewhere on a budget nobody else would approve.

Tags: a24, cinema, Jonathan Glazer, Greta Gerwig, Ari Aster, Hereditary, Lady Bird, The Zone of Interest, Moonlight, Everything Everywhere All at Once