Best A24 Movies Ranked: The Essential Films to Watch

A24 did not become a shorthand for “good indie movie” by releasing one kind of film. It became respected by making space for filmmakers with strong points of view, then presenting those films as events. A chamber drama could be sold with the confidence of a genre picture; a horror movie could be treated as a serious work of grief; an oddball comedy could be allowed to stay odd. The logo gradually came to promise risk, not a house style.

That promise has sometimes been exaggerated. Not every A24 release is a masterpiece, and “A24” is a distributor and studio label, not a genre. Some titles were produced with A24 from the start; others arrived through acquisition. What the brand sold, in either case, was authorship: a sense that somebody made specific choices and trusted an audience to keep up.

The best A24 movies share an unusually direct relationship to the people who made them. They have texture, patience, and the nerve to leave a question unanswered if the answer would flatten the film. This ranking weighs craft, originality, emotional force, rewatch value, and lasting influence—not awards alone, and not vibes alone. Use it as both a canon and a practical watchlist: a map of the essential A24 films, then a way to choose the right first watch for your mood.

If you want a faster discovery path after this essay, pair it with our best drama movies, psychological thriller movies, and best horror movies of the last 10 years.

Top 25 A24 Movies Ranked

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Why it deserves its ranking. The Daniels’ multiverse movie is the rare maximalist film with a clean emotional center: a tired woman, Evelyn Wang, trying to understand her daughter and her own unlived lives. It turns hot-dog fingers, fanny-pack fights, and googly eyes into parts of a sincere argument about kindness. That tonal control is not chaos; it is extraordinary construction.

Best audience. Start here if you want one film that demonstrates A24’s reach—action, absurdist comedy, sci-fi, and family drama in one package. Viewers who prefer restrained realism should know it arrives loud and stays inventive. Similar movies: Swiss Army Man, Ex Machina. Interesting facts: It swept seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and gave Michelle Yeoh the first Best Actress Oscar won by an Asian woman.

2. Moonlight (2016)

Why it deserves its ranking. Barry Jenkins tells a life in three movements without pretending that a life can be neatly explained. Chiron’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood are connected by touch, silence, and the pressure to perform masculinity. James Laxton’s blue-and-purple images are beautiful, but the film’s real achievement is its refusal to reduce vulnerability to a lesson.

Best audience. Essential for viewers drawn to intimate, actor-led drama and anyone exploring the best drama movies of all time. Similar movies: Past Lives, The Farewell. Interesting facts: Adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unproduced play, it won Best Picture after the most notorious envelope error in Oscar history.

3. Ex Machina (2015)

Why it deserves its ranking. Alex Garland’s debut makes artificial intelligence frightening not through explosions but through conversation, power, and desire. The glass-house setting turns every scene between programmer Caleb, CEO Nathan, and Ava into a test of who is observing whom. Its ideas remain sharp because the movie never mistakes a thought experiment for an answer.

Best audience. A precise first choice for people who want cerebral genre filmmaking or the best sci-fi movies. Similar movies: The Lobster, Everything Everywhere All at Once. Interesting facts: Alicia Vikander’s seamless robotic design combined practical costume work and visual effects; the film won the Oscar for Visual Effects against much larger studio competitors.

4. Hereditary (2018)

Why it deserves its ranking. Ari Aster begins with family bereavement and keeps tightening the screw until grief becomes cosmic terror. Toni Collette’s performance is volcanic because the screenplay gives her pain social detail before it gives her supernatural dread. The miniature-house imagery makes domestic life feel like a trap somebody else built.

Best audience. Watch with viewers ready for emotional brutality, not merely jump scares. For more, browse modern horror essentials. Similar movies: Midsommar, The Witch. Interesting facts: Collette was widely viewed as a major awards omission, while Aster’s meticulously composed dollhouse framing became a visual signature overnight.

5. Midsommar (2019)

Why it deserves its ranking. Horror usually hides darkness. Aster puts it under the Swedish summer sun, where every ritual is perfectly visible and still impossible to process. Florence Pugh gives Dani’s breakup a devastatingly recognizable emotional logic, making the cult’s false tenderness feel persuasive before it becomes monstrous.

Best audience. Ideal for viewers who like psychological horror and relationship autopsies more than conventional scares. Similar movies: Hereditary, The Lighthouse. Interesting facts: The production built much of the Hårga village in Hungary; the prolonged daylight was a deliberate reversal of horror’s usual shadows.

6. The Witch (2015)

Why it deserves its ranking. Robert Eggers makes a seventeenth-century family’s exile feel tactile: mud, wool, candlelight, hard labor, and religious certainty curdling into suspicion. The film earns every uncanny image by first making the family’s poverty and isolation credible. It is less about a twist than about a household tearing itself apart.

Best audience. Patient viewers who appreciate period detail, folklore, and dread that accumulates by inches. Similar movies: The Lighthouse, The Green Knight. Interesting facts: Eggers drew dialogue from period sources and shot in Ontario, where natural light and severe weather shaped the film’s austere look.

7. Past Lives (2023)

Why it deserves its ranking. Celine Song’s debut understands that the most consequential romances are sometimes the ones that never become romances. It tracks Nora and Hae Sung across decades and continents with remarkable economy, treating migration, language, marriage, and memory as forces that cannot be solved by a grand gesture.

Best audience. Choose it when you want a quiet film that keeps opening after the credits. Similar movies: Moonlight, Aftersun. Interesting facts: The title refers to the Korean idea of in-yun, a bond formed across past lives; the film received Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Original Screenplay.

8. Lady Bird (2017)

Why it deserves its ranking. Greta Gerwig’s Sacramento coming-of-age story is funny because it recognizes teenage self-importance without condescension. Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf turn a mother-daughter fight into a whole language of love, class anxiety, and mutual frustration. Its briskness is part of the precision: no scene overstays its feeling.

Best audience. The most approachable A24 drama for a mixed group or a first-time viewer. Similar movies: The Farewell, The Florida Project. Interesting facts: Gerwig’s solo directorial debut earned five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Director.

9. The Lighthouse (2019)

Why it deserves its ranking. Eggers turns a two-man lighthouse assignment into a black-and-white fever dream about labor, sex, myth, and power. Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe do not play naturalistic roommates; they duel in a deliberately heightened register until the film becomes a filthy sea shanty from hell.

Best audience. For adventurous viewers willing to laugh, recoil, and surrender to ambiguity. Similar movies: The Witch, The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Interesting facts: It was shot in a nearly square 1.19:1 ratio on black-and-white film stock, an aesthetic choice that makes the frame feel like a prison.

10. The Green Knight (2021)

Why it deserves its ranking. David Lowery adapts Arthurian legend as a dream of moral failure. Dev Patel’s Gawain wants the reputation of courage without its cost, and the movie makes every landscape look like it is testing that wish. Its deliberate pace is the point: this is a quest story about waiting long enough to face yourself.

Best audience. Best for fantasy viewers seeking mood, myth, and ambiguity over lore mechanics. Similar movies: The Witch, A Ghost Story. Interesting facts: Production paused during the pandemic, and Lowery re-edited the finished film rather than releasing an earlier cut he felt was too conventional.

11. Uncut Gems (2019)

Why it deserves its ranking. The Safdie brothers build a panic attack with a plot. Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner is selfish, magnetic, and catastrophically unable to stop gambling on the next score. The overlapping dialogue, thumping score, and crowded Diamond District locations make desperation feel physical rather than conceptual.

Best audience. Choose this for maximum velocity; it is a thrilling but stressful watch. Similar movies: Good Time, Civil War. Interesting facts: Sandler trained around New York’s jewelry trade, and the film’s real NBA-game integration gives its climax unusual live-wire tension.

12. Good Time (2017)

Why it deserves its ranking. Before Uncut Gems, the Safdies made this lean nocturnal nightmare about a small-time criminal improvising worse decisions across Queens. Robert Pattinson’s performance is a revelation precisely because it refuses movie-star polish. Every escape route becomes another hallway in a bad idea.

Best audience. Crime-thriller fans who enjoy relentless momentum and morally compromised protagonists. Similar movies: Uncut Gems, The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Interesting facts: Pattinson reportedly lived in a Harlem apartment while preparing, and Oneohtrix Point Never’s synth score won at Cannes.

13. Aftersun (2022)

Why it deserves its ranking. Charlotte Wells reconstructs a father-daughter holiday through memory’s incomplete evidence: camcorder footage, a dance floor, a glance held too long. Paul Mescal gives Calum warmth without ever making him fully legible. The film’s emotional force comes from what Sophie, looking back, can finally recognize but cannot repair.

Best audience. Watch when you are prepared for a subtle drama that lands hard afterward. Similar movies: Past Lives, A Ghost Story. Interesting facts: Wells drew on personal memories without making the film a direct autobiography; Mescal earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

14. The Florida Project (2017)

Why it deserves its ranking. Sean Baker films childhood at the edge of Disney World with bright colors, mischievous energy, and no sentimental lie about poverty. Brooklynn Prince’s Moonee sees a playground; the adults see motel bills, precarious work, and institutions closing in. The film honors both perceptions.

Best audience. For viewers who value social realism with humor and lived-in detail. Similar movies: Lady Bird, Moonlight. Interesting facts: Willem Dafoe received an Oscar nomination, while the guerrilla-style Disney World material gives the ending its startling burst of release.

15. Room (2015)

Why it deserves its ranking. Lenny Abrahamson and Emma Donoghue avoid turning captivity into spectacle by anchoring the story in a child’s understanding of the world. Brie Larson’s Ma is both protector and person, and Jacob Tremblay gives Jack curiosity without cute calculation. The escape is not the finish line; recovery is the harder story.

Best audience. A powerful choice for drama viewers, with a clear content warning for abduction and trauma. Similar movies: Moonlight, Aftersun. Interesting facts: Larson won Best Actress, and Tremblay’s performance was widely praised despite the Academy’s reluctance to nominate child actors.

16. Civil War (2024)

Why it deserves its ranking. Garland’s American conflict film is not a prediction manual. It is a road movie about journalists witnessing a country’s collapse and the numbing cost of looking. Its power comes from withholding easy political comfort and making the photographers’ professional detachment feel both necessary and disturbing.

Best audience. Best for thriller viewers who want a tense, unsettling conversation starter. Similar movies: Ex Machina, Uncut Gems. Interesting facts: It was A24’s most expensive production at release and its largest domestic box-office opening, marking a new scale for the company.

17. The Iron Claw (2023)

Why it deserves its ranking. Sean Durkin finds the horror in a family that mistakes emotional repression for strength. Zac Efron’s Kevin Von Erich is not an imitation of a wrestler; he is a son trying to earn affection inside a dynasty built on pain. The wrestling scenes have impact because the domestic scenes have scars.

Best audience. A strong pick for sports-film skeptics and viewers wanting a tragic family drama. Similar movies: Aftersun, Room. Interesting facts: The film compresses the real Von Erich story, including the omission of one brother, to make its devastating focus manageable.

18. The Zone of Interest (2023)

Why it deserves its ranking. Jonathan Glazer places the commandant of Auschwitz and his family beside the camp, then refuses the audience the relief of conventional atrocity imagery. The horror is carried by sound—shots, trains, cries—and by the household’s obscene normality. It is a formal and ethical provocation, not an easy recommendation.

Best audience. For viewers ready for austere, demanding historical cinema. Similar movies: Under the Skin, A Ghost Story. Interesting facts: It won the Oscar for International Feature and Sound; its soundscape was designed to make violence present even when it remains offscreen.

19. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)

Why it deserves its ranking. Dean Fleischer Camp expands a tiny internet character into a gentle mock-documentary about loneliness, community, and caring for elders. Marcel’s miniature world is funny, but Jenny Slate’s voice performance never leans on cuteness. The movie earns tears by taking a shell’s small problems seriously.

Best audience. A rare all-ages option that works especially well for families and tenderhearted adults. Similar movies: The Farewell, Everything Everywhere All at Once. Interesting facts: The stop-motion character is composited into live-action spaces; it received an Oscar nomination for Animated Feature.

20. Talk to Me (2023)

Why it deserves its ranking. Danny and Michael Philippou give possession horror the contagious behavior of a teenage dare. Sophie Wilde’s Mia is grieving, vulnerable, and chasing intensity, which makes the embalmed-hand ritual more than a clever premise. The movie understands how quickly a party game becomes an addiction.

Best audience. The best contemporary gateway to A24 horror for viewers who want real scares and a brisk pace. Similar movies: Hereditary, Midsommar. Interesting facts: The directors came from the RackaRacka YouTube channel, and the film became a major international success for A24.

21. A Ghost Story (2017)

Why it deserves its ranking. Lowery asks what time does to a home, then has Casey Affleck play a dead man under a literal white sheet. The premise sounds like a joke; the execution is patient, mournful, and startlingly cosmic. Rooney Mara’s famous pie scene is not a stunt—it is grief allowed to occupy real duration.

Best audience. For viewers receptive to stillness, formal experimentation, and melancholy. Similar movies: Aftersun, The Green Knight. Interesting facts: The nearly square frame and deliberately simple ghost costume make the film feel both like a memory and an old photograph.

22. Swiss Army Man (2016)

Why it deserves its ranking. The Daniels’ first feature begins with a farting corpse and ends up as a tender story about shame, friendship, and the strange rules people learn to appear normal. Daniel Radcliffe commits completely to the bodily absurdity, which lets Paul Dano’s loneliness stop being an abstract indie complaint.

Best audience. Try it if you like weird comedy with a real emotional destination; avoid it if scatological surrealism is a dealbreaker. Similar movies: Everything Everywhere All at Once, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Interesting facts: It premiered at Sundance, where its walkouts became part of its legend, then won the Directing Award.

23. The Lobster (2015)

Why it deserves its ranking. Yorgos Lanthimos uses a deadpan dystopia in which single people must find partners or become animals to expose the cruelty of romantic rules. Colin Farrell’s blankness is the joke and the wound: everyone is performing intimacy by policy. The film is chilly, but its satire lands because the social pressure is recognizable.

Best audience. For fans of absurdist, cerebral comedy who do not need characters to be conventionally likable. Similar movies: The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Ex Machina. Interesting facts: It won the Jury Prize at Cannes and marked Lanthimos’s English-language breakthrough.

24. The Farewell (2019)

Why it deserves its ranking. Lulu Wang’s “actual lie” story is both specific to a Chinese American family and broad in its understanding of how relatives love badly and well. Awkwafina plays Billi without turning her into an automatic moral center. The film asks whether truth always belongs to the individual or sometimes to the family carrying it.

Best audience. An ideal choice for viewers seeking warm, funny, emotionally intelligent drama. Similar movies: Lady Bird, Past Lives. Interesting facts: Wang adapted her own family experience, first told on This American Life; the film established Awkwafina as a dramatic lead.

25. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Why it deserves its ranking. Lanthimos turns a doctor’s past mistake into a curse with the logic of Greek tragedy and the tone of an antiseptic nightmare. The deliberately flat performances are divisive, but that distance makes the family’s impossible bargain feel ritualistic rather than merely sensational.

Best audience. Save it for viewers who enjoyed The Lobster’s chilliness and want something darker. Similar movies: The Lobster, The Lighthouse. Interesting facts: The title invokes the myth of Agamemnon and Iphigenia; it won Best Screenplay at Cannes.

Best A24 Movies by Genre

Horror

For pure dread, start with Hereditary. It is the most emotionally punishing; The Witch is the best entry for historical folklore; Midsommar turns a breakup into ritual nightmare; and Talk to Me is the sharpest modern crowd-pleaser. It Comes at Night belongs here too if you want apocalyptic dread without a monster reveal. A24 horror is not a single formula—these films use fear to explore family, faith, grief, and social belonging. Continue with our psychological thriller guide when you want unease without the same supernatural emphasis, or browse the best horror movies of the last 10 years collection for a wider recent map.

Drama

Moonlight, Past Lives, Aftersun, and The Farewell are the essential A24 dramas. Each trusts omission: what is not said carries as much weight as dialogue. Room and The Iron Claw are more openly devastating, while The Florida Project finds drama in childhood at the edge of spectacle. Browse more best drama movies if intimate performance is your priority, or the quieter titles in movies that quietly break you.

Thriller

Uncut Gems and Good Time are sweat-inducing propulsion machines, while Civil War turns contemporary anxiety into a brutal road thriller. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is slower and stranger, built for viewers who like a threat to sit in the room. Find more in the best thriller movies list and the psychological thriller movies guide when you want pressure without constant set pieces.

Sci-Fi

Ex Machina remains the cleanest science-fiction recommendation: compact, sexy, unnerving, and intellectually alive. Everything Everywhere All at Once is its opposite in scale and tone, using genre mechanics for emotional release. The Lobster applies speculative rules to romance, not technology, and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin is the colder, more alien cousin—less plot machinery, more predatory mystery. For a broader map, explore mind-bending movies and best sci-fi movies.

Comedy

Lady Bird finds comedy in family friction, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On in miniature observation, Swiss Army Man in gleeful taboo-breaking, and Bodies Bodies Bodies in status-game satire with knives. The lesson is useful: an A24 comedy is often funny because it lets embarrassment, sadness, and absurdity occupy the same frame instead of sanding them into a safer joke.

What Makes an A24 Movie Feel Different?

The useful answer is not that every release “looks like A24.” It does not. What the company’s strongest films share is permission to be specific. Aster’s domestic terror, Jenkins’s romantic lyricism, Garland’s clean conceptual spaces, and the Safdies’ abrasive New York urgency are not interchangeable. The brand’s achievement is helping audiences recognize a filmmaker’s voice as the attraction.

Filmmaking and cinematography

These films often make a visual decision early and follow it all the way through: the boxed-in black-and-white of The Lighthouse, the sunlit nightmare of Midsommar, the saturated motel world of The Florida Project. The images are not merely expensive-looking; they establish how the story feels to inhabit.

Storytelling and originality

A24’s best projects are comfortable with unresolved feeling. Past Lives does not manufacture a clean romantic verdict. Ex Machina makes viewers revise their alliances. Everything Everywhere All at Once risks ridiculousness to reach tenderness. That willingness to let form carry meaning is why the catalog supplies so many smart movies that make you think.

Atmosphere

Atmosphere is the through line. Sound, production design, performance rhythms, and editing make an A24 film’s world feel complete before its plot has fully declared itself. It is why a lighthouse, a suburban miniature, a motel balcony, or a bare sci-fi lab can linger longer than a conventional set piece.

Hidden Gems: Overlooked A24 Movies

These are not “hidden” in the literal sense—each has devoted fans—but they deserve more attention beside the obvious Oscar magnets and horror landmarks. If the Top 25 is the syllabus, this section is the elective that often becomes a favorite.

• Eighth Grade is Bo Burnham’s painfully accurate portrait of digital-age adolescence, with Elsie Fisher finding courage in moments that adults might miss. It is one of the most useful coming-of-age films of the last decade precisely because it refuses nostalgia.
• Mid90s captures a young outsider’s entry into skate culture with affection but no nostalgia polish; its texture—music, bruises, borrowed cool—is part of its emotional memory.
• The Last Black Man in San Francisco turns gentrification, friendship, and an impossible home into lyrical city cinema. Joe Talbot’s visual grace never softens the film’s anger about who gets to belong where.
• Waves begins as a family implosion and then shifts perspective with unusual generosity, using music and camera movement to express what words cannot. Watch it when you want a drama that changes shape midstream.
• It Comes at Night is a chamber thriller about mistrust rather than a conventional apocalypse. Go in for the dread, not an explanation of every threat outside the cabin.
• Bodies Bodies Bodies is a sharp, funny slasher about status games and online language, led by a terrific Amandla Stenberg and Maria Bakalova. It is the rare horror-comedy that understands how young people talk without turning that talk into a punchline museum.
• The Tragedy of Macbeth strips Shakespeare to stark black-and-white geometry, letting Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand make ambition feel elemental. It is overlooked mainly because awards-season Shakespeare can sound like homework; this one is closer to a fever.

For more films that fell through the cracks, see our underrated movies guide and the underrated movies quick list.

FAQ

What is the best A24 movie?

Everything Everywhere All at Once takes the top spot because it is both wildly original and emotionally generous. If you prefer quiet drama, choose Moonlight; if you want horror, choose Hereditary.

Which A24 movie should I watch first?

Start with Everything Everywhere All at Once for the broadest introduction. Pick Lady Bird for something grounded, Ex Machina for intelligent sci-fi, or Talk to Me for accessible horror.

Are all A24 movies horror?

No. Horror is one important part of its reputation, but A24’s US releases include Oscar-winning dramas, comedies, thrillers, animation, and science fiction. Moonlight and The Farewell are as central to its story as any scary movie.

Has A24 won Oscars?

Yes. Moonlight won Best Picture, and Everything Everywhere All at Once won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The company’s awards record reflects its dramatic work as much as its genre reputation.

What is the scariest A24 movie?

Hereditary is the most harrowing overall. The Witch is best for folk horror, Midsommar for bright-daylight discomfort, and Talk to Me for a more direct supernatural jolt.

Why are A24 movies so distinctive?

They are distinctive when directors are allowed to pursue a complete point of view. The result can be polarizing, but it is rarely anonymous: the choices in image, sound, rhythm, and performance belong to the film rather than an algorithmic template.

The Essential A24 Watchlist Starts Here

If you watch only five films from this list, make them Everything Everywhere All at Once, Moonlight, Ex Machina, Hereditary, and Past Lives. Together, they show why the A24 name matters: not because it guarantees one mood, but because it has made room for movies with moods of their own.

Pick by appetite, not homework. Need a great date-night drama? Start Past Lives. Want to be rattled? Put on Hereditary. Need a wild, hopeful reset? Everything Everywhere is waiting. Then use AI search to turn a favorite into your next recommendation, or explore our best movies of all time when the list has made you hungry for a wider canon.