The Best A24 Movies, Ranked

Two hours of Adam Sandler making catastrophically bad decisions at full volume, and the most stressful thing A24 has ever put out. The Safdie brothers built the plot around the real 2012 NBA playoffs, with Kevin Garnett playing himself and refusing to hand back Howard's opal. It grossed $50 million domestic, the company's best until 2022. The final three-way parlay on Garnett and the Celtics is the purest sequence they have ever cut.

Shot on 35mm black-and-white in a boxy 1.19:1 frame, Robert Eggers' two-hander strands Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson on a rock and lets them drink, lie and gaslight each other until reality gives out. A24 released it in 2019 and nothing else in the catalogue plays remotely like it. Pattinson beating the seagull to death on the rocks is the point of no return, and the film knows it.

Here sits the consensus number one, third on purpose — seven Oscars in 2023, including Best Picture for the Daniels, and most polls would lead with it. It earns everything except the top slot: the multiverse sprawl blunts a few landings on rewatch. Still, the hot dog fingers universe resolving into a sincere piano duet is the wildest tonal save of the decade. Argue below; the vote exists for exactly this.

Barry Jenkins' triptych won Best Picture in 2017 after the wrong envelope briefly handed the award to La La Land — the messiest coronation in Oscar history for the quietest winner. Juan teaching Little to float in the Atlantic, one hand under his head, does more character work in ninety seconds than most trilogies manage. Fourth here only because the top three cling harder on a rewatch.

Ari Aster's first feature became A24's biggest earner of its day, passing $80 million worldwide in 2018, which is absurd for a film this committed to hurting its audience. Toni Collette's dinner table eruption at her son is the scariest scene in it, and nothing supernatural happens during it. The telephone-pole sequence reset mainstream horror's idea of how early and how hard a film can swing.

Jonathan Glazer filmed Scarlett Johansson trawling Glasgow in a van rigged with hidden cameras, picking up real men who learned afterwards they were in a movie. A24 handled only the US release of the 2013 British production — a pickup, and the best one they ever made. The beach scene, a toddler left screaming on the shingle as the tide comes in, is the coldest thing the logo has ever fronted.

Nothing on this list sneaks up on you like Charlotte Wells' debut — a BBC Film and Screen Scotland production A24 only distributed stateside — a small holiday memoir that folds into grief in its final ten minutes. Paul Mescal earned a 2023 Best Actor nomination as Calum, a young father performing steadiness for his daughter. The Under Pressure finale, strobe-cut between the dance floor and a corridor of memory, justifies every slow minute. Seventh is not hedging.

Five 2018 Oscar nominations, zero wins — Greta Gerwig's solo directing debut lost every category and still owns its era. Saoirse Ronan ends the opening argument with her mother by rolling out of the moving car, and the film never drops that tempo. Warmest entry in the whole catalogue; the thrift-store scenes between Ronan and Laurie Metcalf are the actual love story.

Sound does the seeing in Jonathan Glazer's Auschwitz film: the camera never crosses the wall, while Johnnie Burn's mix carries gunshots and furnace-roar into a family garden. It won 2024 Oscars for Best International Feature and Best Sound. A24 distributed it in the US and UK; the production itself is British-Polish-American, worth naming on an A24 list. Hedwig trying on a confiscated fur coat is the film in one image.

Celine Song wrote her own immigration story into her first feature and drew Best Picture and Original Screenplay nominations in 2024 for it. Nothing louder than a conversation happens, which is the trick. Nora translating between her husband and Hae Sung in a shared bar booth — two possible lives at one table — is the scene of 2023, and the silent wait for the car afterwards is the bruise.

Brady Corbet shot his 215-minute immigrant epic in VistaVision, the first feature on the format since 1961, and Adrien Brody's László Tóth won the 2025 Best Actor Oscar. Another pickup, for the record: Brookstreet and Andrew Lauren produced it, and A24 paid a reported $10–15 million for US rights a week after Venice. That first look at the Statue of Liberty — inverted, lurching into frame from the ship's hold — announces how off-balance the American dream will play.

Strictly a distribution pickup — Universal would not release it in America, A24 would, and Alex Garland's directing debut became the young label's calling card. IMDb files it under 2014, Letterboxd under 2015; the Best Visual Effects Oscar came in 2016 either way. Nathan's out-of-nowhere disco dance with Kyoko slices the dread with menace-camp, and Ava's corridor escape still lands. Twelfth is fair: A24 shipped it, but did not make it.

Sean Baker parked a candy-colored childhood in a budget motel outside Disney World and let Willem Dafoe, a 2018 Best Supporting Actor nominee for it, play the only adult holding the place together. Moonee's ice-cream scams feel documentary-loose, then the ending detonates: a final dash into the Magic Kingdom, shot guerrilla-style on an iPhone 6S Plus because permission was never coming. Bobby the motel manager is Dafoe's best work this century.

Josh Safdie went solo and made a 1950s table-tennis picture that ran to $74 million domestic after opening in December 2025 — a figure checked against Box Office Mojo in August 2026, because it sounds invented. Timothée Chalamet's Marty Mauser, loosely built on the hustler Marty Reisman, treats ping-pong like a religion nobody else can hear. The tournament rallies are staged like the heist Uncut Gems never got to run. Recency bias? Vote it down and prove it.

Fifteenth is this list's cruelest call, and I will take the abuse for it. Lee Isaac Chung planted his own Arkansas childhood here, and Youn Yuh-jung became the first Korean actor to win an Oscar — Best Supporting Actress, 2021 — as a grandmother who swears, gambles and saves the family anyway. Soonja showing David where minari grows by the creek is the film's quiet engine, and the barn fire pays it off brutally.

Danny and Michael Philippou followed Talk to Me with something meaner: Sally Hawkins as Laura, a foster mother whose grief has curdled into a plan, released by A24 in May 2025 to nearly $40 million worldwide. Hawkins plays warm in ways a second viewing makes unbearable. The grainy VHS tapes of a cult ritual, doled out a few frames at a time, do the explaining the script refuses to. Sixteenth today, first in line to climb.