A Cannes prize-winning body horror, a wordless animated Oscar miracle: in 2024 European cinema reached for bigger subjects and refused to flinch.
2024 may be remembered as the year European cinema got its appetite for scale back. There was a Hungarian-Jewish architect in postwar America, a Mexican cartel boss who transitions in a Spanish-language musical, an Iranian judge whose pistol goes missing while protests fill the streets of Tehran, and a black cat adrift on a rising sea. None of these are small films, in length or in ambition, and the festival circuit and awards season answered in kind.
Coralie Fargeat won the Cannes screenplay prize for The Substance; Brady Corbet took the Venice Silver Lion for The Brutalist; Pedro Almodóvar finally won the Golden Lion after four decades of work; Mohammad Rasoulof escaped Iran on foot to present The Seed of the Sacred Fig; and Latvia's Gints Zilbalodis won his country's first ever Oscar with a dialogue-free animation made in Blender. By March 2025, European productions had picked up Academy Awards for Best Actor, Best Animated Feature, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Song, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
These are the ten European films of 2024 we think will shape how the year is remembered.
1. The Substance
Dir. Coralie Fargeat · France / UK · Body Horror · Cannes Best Screenplay
Coralie Fargeat's second feature took the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes 2024, won Demi Moore the Golden Globe for Best Actress, and earned five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. Fargeat then became the first French woman to win the directing César since Tonie Marshall a quarter-century earlier. Moore plays an ageing television fitness star who buys a black-market serum that creates a younger, perfect duplicate of herself (Margaret Qualley). The two selves have to swap consciousness on a strict weekly schedule.
Shot in France and the UK by Benjamin Kračun (the cinematographer behind Saltburn) on a budget of roughly $18 million, the film is a body-horror satire of Hollywood's contempt for ageing women. The prosthetics by Pierre-Olivier Persin and Marilyne Scarselli won the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling and were probably the most-discussed single craft achievement of the awards season. Moore's career had quietened in the preceding decade, and the role brought her roaring back; Fargeat cast her deliberately, so the film's central conceit plays out in real time.
2. The Brutalist
Dir. Brady Corbet · UK / Hungary / US · Period Drama · Venice Silver Lion
Brady Corbet's third feature, co-written with Mona Fastvold, runs 215 minutes including a 15-minute intermission. It was shot on VistaVision, largely in Hungary and on a famously modest budget, and won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 81st Venice International Film Festival. It went on to ten Academy Award nominations and won three: Best Actor for Adrien Brody, Best Cinematography for Lol Crawley, and Best Original Score for Daniel Blumberg, who wrote for orchestra and prepared piano.
Brody plays László Tóth, a fictional Bauhaus-trained Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who arrives in post-war Pennsylvania, where a wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), commissions him for a vast civic project while he waits to be reunited with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones). The mid-century typography and intermission card consciously recall the long American epics of the 1950s. For a 21st-century mid-budget feature the critical response was unusually strong: the AFI put it in its Top 10 of 2024, it dominated the Golden Globe drama categories, and Corbet took the BAFTA for Best Director.
3. Emilia Pérez
Dir. Jacques Audiard · France · Musical / Crime · Cannes Jury Prize
Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez opened at Cannes 2024 and won three prizes there, including the Jury Prize and a shared Best Performance award for the four-woman ensemble of Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz. It went on to thirteen Academy Award nominations, winning two (Best Supporting Actress for Saldaña and Best Original Song), and took Best Film and Best Director at the European Film Awards. A Mexican cartel boss hires an overlooked Mexico City lawyer to arrange a faked death and a transition, and emerges as Emilia Pérez. Years later, she tries to step back into the family she left behind.
It is a Spanish-language musical thriller shot on Paris soundstages, with original songs by composer Clément Ducol and singer-songwriter Camille. Audiard's attempt to be a cartel thriller, a musical, a gender-identity drama and a procedural all at once made it one of the most argued-about films of the year, with real political controversy in Mexico over how it depicts cartel violence and in the US over its portrayal of a trans woman. Her central performance is where critics agreed most, and it is arguably her career best.
4. Conclave
Dir. Edward Berger · UK / US · Drama / Thriller · Oscar Best Adapted Screenplay
Edward Berger's follow-up to All Quiet on the Western Front won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (Peter Straughan, adapting Robert Harris's 2016 novel) and the BAFTA for Best Film. When the Pope dies, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), Dean of the College of Cardinals, convenes the secret election inside the Sistine Chapel to choose his successor, and tensions rise as hidden conflicts come to light. Stanley Tucci plays the American liberal cardinal Bellini, John Lithgow the Canadian conservative Tremblay, and Isabella Rossellini the senior nun Sister Agnes.
Berger treats it as a procedural about institutional politics, with doctrine in the background, and the film consolidated his English-language Hollywood reputation after his German-language Oscar success. Stéphane Fontaine photographs the Sistine Chapel interiors and the Casa Santa Marta dormitory (the latter built at Cinecittà, not the Vatican) with a look all their own, and Fiennes gives one of his most restrained and distinguished performances in over a decade. It is grown-up, intelligent prestige cinema of the old kind.
5. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Dir. Mohammad Rasoulof · Germany / Iran / France · Political Thriller · Oscar Nominee
Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig premiered at Cannes 2024 and won a Special Award. In Germany it won the Lola for Best Film (Silver) and Best Actor for Missagh Zareh, and it earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film. It was shot in secret in Iran, in defiance of the eight-year prison sentence Rasoulof was already under; the director fled the country on foot through mountainous border country before the Cannes premiere.
Iman (Zareh), a long-serving lawyer in Tehran's Revolutionary Court, is promoted to investigating judge, a post that requires him to sign execution orders for protesters. Then, during the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, his government-issued service pistol disappears from inside the family home, and his paranoia turns on his wife Najmeh and their two daughters. The film cuts between domestic claustrophobia and protesters' mobile-phone footage, and works as a domestic thriller, a political allegory and a real-time act of witness at once. It was arguably the most morally consequential European co-production of the year, and making it at all took courage from everyone involved.
6. Vermiglio
Dir. Maura Delpero · Italy · Period Drama · Venice Silver Lion
Maura Delpero's Vermiglio took the Silver Lion (the Grand Jury Prize), the second-highest honour at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, and was Italy's official submission for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, making the December 2024 shortlist of fifteen. In an isolated Alpine village during the final winter of the Second World War, a large Catholic family shelters a pair of Italian army deserters. When one of the soldiers falls for the eldest daughter and they marry, the modern world begins to intrude on a community that has kept the same shape for generations.
The cast is almost entirely non-professional, recruited from the real village of Vermiglio in the Trentino region (where Delpero's family comes from) and the surrounding Val di Sole communities, and the local Solandro dialect is kept on screen and subtitled. The cinematographer is Mikhail Krichman, the Russian DP best known for his long collaboration with Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, Loveless), an unusual choice that drew a lot of attention to the film's Alpine winter look. It is a patient, exquisitely photographed second feature from one of the most welcome new voices of the year.
7. Flow
Dir. Gints Zilbalodis · Latvia / France / Belgium · Animation · Oscar Best Animated Feature
Gints Zilbalodis's Flow (Straume) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2025. It was Latvia's first ever Oscar and, more remarkably, the first dialogue-free animated feature ever to win the category. It also took the Golden Globe in the same category and was nominated for Best International Feature Film. Zilbalodis made it over five years on a budget of roughly €3.7 million, partly in the free open-source animation software Blender.
A solitary black cat in a flooded world is forced onto a small, unmoored sailing boat with a slowly growing crew of equally stranded animals (a labrador, a capybara, a secretary bird, a ring-tailed lemur) as the water keeps rising. There are no human characters, no dialogue and no animals talking in translation; when they communicate, it is through animal sounds. The score by Rihards Zaļupe and Zilbalodis is built around a recurring orchestral theme that does much of the storytelling, and it is among the most loved animated soundtracks of recent years. Any future argument about what independent European animation can do commercially will probably start here.
8. Kneecap
Dir. Rich Peppiatt · Ireland / UK · Comedy / Music · Sundance Audience Award
Rich Peppiatt's Kneecap won the Audience Award (World Cinema Dramatic) at Sundance 2024, took the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer/Director/Producer the following year, and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film, which makes it one of the most internationally successful Irish-language productions of recent years. The real Kneecap rap trio (Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara, and DJ Próvaí) play fictionalised versions of themselves, with Michael Fassbender as Mo Chara's father.
Three Belfast kids turn their lives, their drugs and their republican swagger into a hip-hop trio rapping mainly in Irish. The film tells a fictionalised origin story across a year in West Belfast, with run-ins along the way with the music industry, the Northern Ireland Police Service, the Irish-language activist community and the wider politics of late-2010s Belfast. It is gleefully irreverent about Irish-republican history, deliberately provocative about Northern Irish identity politics, and plays long stretches in Irish. It is funny and generous, and it doubles as a manifesto for a language revival nobody saw coming.
9. Small Things Like These
Dir. Tim Mielants · Ireland / Belgium · Drama · Berlinale Opening Film
Tim Mielants's Small Things Like These opened the 2024 Berlinale, the first Irish film ever given the opening slot, and won Emily Watson the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance. Enda Walsh adapted it from Claire Keegan's slim 2021 novella (Booker-shortlisted, translated into over thirty languages), and it stars Cillian Murphy in his first project after winning the Academy Award for Oppenheimer. In 1985, a coal merchant in New Ross discovers something at the local convent and has to reckon with what he has seen.
Its subject is the institutional cruelty of the Magdalene laundries, the Catholic-run workhouses for unmarried mothers and other women that operated in Ireland from the eighteenth century until 1996. The Irish state issued a formal apology in 2013 after the McAleese Report. The film belongs alongside The Magdalene Sisters and Philomena among cinema's major dramatic treatments of the subject: a muted, morally weighted miniature, with Murphy carrying it almost entirely in glances.
10. The Room Next Door
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar · Spain · Drama · Venice Golden Lion
Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door (Spanish: La habitación de al lado) won the Golden Lion at the 81st Venice International Film Festival. It was the first time Almodóvar had taken the Venice top prize in over forty years of work, and his first English-language feature to compete in any major festival's main competition. It went on to an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez's 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, it pairs Tilda Swinton as Martha, a war correspondent facing terminal cancer, with Julianne Moore as Ingrid, the friend she has drifted away from over the years and whom she asks for company as she contemplates her own departure.
Almodóvar prepared for the move into English with two short films, The Human Voice (2020) with Swinton and Strange Way of Life (2023) with Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke. He wrote the screenplay himself; Eduard Grau shot it, and the score is by Alberto Iglesias, his collaborator of over thirty years. Almodóvar has described the film as a continuation of the late-period reflection on ageing and friendship he began with Pain and Glory in 2019. It is tender and formally measured, and its two lead performances land without ever raising their voices.
The Year European Cinema Reached for Bigger Subjects
What connects these ten films is a willingness to take on subjects that earlier generations might have left to documentary, to the American studio epic, or to no one at all: the Magdalene laundries, state cruelty under the Islamic Republic, trans identity inside a Spanish-language musical, a Holocaust survivor up against the postwar American dream, Hollywood's contempt for ageing women, assisted dying as an act of friendship. None of these are easy commercial pitches, and a decade ago most would have been made as smaller, quieter films. In 2024 they were made at scale, with stars, and shown on the world's biggest festival stages.
The year's other surprise was that Europe's most loved film, by some distance, had no dialogue at all. Flow went from a tiny Latvian production made in free software to a Golden Globe, an Oscar and a permanent place in the canon of independent animation. It was the most unexpected story of the awards season, and the clearest sign that audiences wanted European cinema to be ambitious about form as well as subject.
If you watch only one of these, pick the subject you would most like to be argued with about. In 2024 European cinema treated its audience as adults, and the favour is worth returning.
For more in this vein, see our companion guide to the 10 Must-Watch European Films of 2025, the festival cycle that followed in our recap of Every Cannes 2026 Winner You Need to See, and our guide to 10 Must-Watch Polish Films, which traces some of the Central European traditions that fed into The Brutalist.
