The 10 best Canadian films of 2024, a year on the cusp of confidence and crisis | Canada Voices

Viewed from a certain perch, Canadian filmmakers enjoyed a banner year. From the sands of Cannes to the dunes of Arrakis, our artists held strong and free – even if the average follower of Club Chalamet might be unaware of Denis Villeneuve’s nationality. Heck, we even got the attention of the U.S. president-elect with the (sorta) Canadian Trump dramedy The Apprentice, which earns the award for Best Clickbait Biopic of 2024.

From a more ground-level perspective, though, the industry is enduring as many challenges as ever. If you can ignore the broken promises of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to properly sustain Telefilm, you might not be able to so easily avert your gaze from the crushing reality facing our independent movie theatres or film festivals. But culture crises are as Canadian as Cronenberg – and the following titles proved that our filmmakers are a tenacious lot, unwavering in their commitment to telling stories. Come hell or high tariffs.

In typical Canadian-film fashion, many of the movies below have already come and gone from the big screen, or won’t make the leap from the 2024 film-festival circuit to general release for a few more months. Which is all the more reason to put them on your radar now.

This might seem like an odd pairing, but there were no two other films this year that felt so sharply, ferociously tuned to their very own particular (and wildly different) comedic wavelengths. In Frankie Freako, Steven Kostanski commodifies a super-niche stream of ‘80s junk into a wildly entertaining lark about the antics of a hard-partying interdimensional critter. In The Heirloom, the audacious Canadian cinema power couple (there are such things!) Ben Petrie and Grace Glowicki stretch their deadpan charms to the very brink, playing a couple who place their collective pandemic-era anxieties onto the stress of raising a rescue pup. (Frankie Freako is on-demand via Apple TV; The Heirloom is now playing select cities)

Tracing the epic life story of Toronto chef Sash Simpson, Born Hungry comes equipped with a killer elevator pitch: the heart-wrenching orphan drama of Lion meets the gastro-tourism of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Director Barry Avrich’s documentary isn’t afraid to get complicated and messy, either, revelling in mysteries that other films would be eager to tidily resolve. It leaves your heart full, your stomach hungry. (Streaming on Crave)

Especially anxious moviegoers may spend the first half-hour of Ru waiting for the other shoe to drop. The film traces the journey of a wealthy Vietnamese family to small-town Quebec after the fall of Saigon, and decades worth of similarly themed culture-shock melodramas have prepared audiences to witness traumatic instances of immigrant suffering – slurs, physical abuse, all manner of prejudice. Yet Charles-Olivier Michaud’s adaptation of Kim Thuy’s bestselling memoir has too big a heart for such ugly memories, instead offering a warm-welcome story that is determined to win you over. (Streaming on Crave)

There is a tender mystery to Sofia Bohdanowicz’s epic-sized feature. A psychological ghost story infused with elements of an academic thriller, the film follows a young researcher named Audrey Benac (Deragh Campbell) as she uncovers the career of real-life violinist Kathleen Parlow, whose accomplishments have been long forgotten. Slow but purposeful, sad but never melancholy, Bohdanowicz’s film assembles so many disparate influences that it feels entirely fresh, and ripe for repeated analysis. (Coming to theatres early 2025)

6. 40 Acres

Finally making its way to the screen after years of development, noted television director R.T. Thorne’s feature debut is top-tier genre Trojan-horsing that puts it in league with such homegrown thrillers as Blood Quantum. Set in a future where food is dwindling and farming is the only means of survival, 40 Acres blends furious social commentary with blood-soaked action, all shot with an eye for beautiful rot. And star Danielle Deadwyler is so fierce in her lead role that I was genuinely concerned about the actress’s resting heart rate. (Coming to theatres early 2025)

There are three stories being told in Stephen Hosier’s startling documentary Attila. The first is the downward spiral of Attila Csanyi, a young man who endured a traumatic childhood inside Ontario’s foster-care system only to develop a drug addiction that, compounded with his schizophrenia, left him bouncing between unstable living situations. The second tale is that of Attila’s twin brother, Richard, who teams up with his childhood friend, the filmmaker Hosier, to investigate his sibling’s final days. But it is the third thread of Hosier’s film that ensures Attila lingers, as the doc paints a portrait of Hamilton as a city haunted by the opioid crisis. Hosier weaves together a deeply empathetic horror story that should serve as a shock to the system. (Streaming on Crave)

An ingenious and diabolical cross between a Friday the 13th flick and an open-world video-game à la the Grand Theft Auto series – but pitched to the slowed down tempo of a Gus Van Sant film – In a Violent Nature is the most terrifying, gross and often quite funny reworking of the slasher genre in ages. Filmed almost entirely from the perspective of a mute Jason Voorhees-like psycho named Johnny (Ry Barrett), director Chris Nash’s film patiently documents the slow slaughter of a group of young adults who make the mistake of spending a few nights in the Ontario wilderness. This is horror with art on its mind, and blood on its hands. (Streaming on Shudder, available on-demand via Apple TV, Amazon)

An anti-meet-cute story, Kazik Radwanski’s latest low-fi character study follows the back-and-forth relationship between a creative writing professor (Deragh Campbell, a two-timer on this list) and the charismatic ex who pops back into her life after he’s become a semi-successful bad-boy novelist (BlackBerry rogue Matt Johnson). Shot over the course of months and months, the film has an improvisatory air to it, but guided by exacting vision and tremendously felt performances from both leads, who are as close to Canadian film royalty it gets. (Available digitally in 2025)

A grand experiment in prestige quirk, Guy Maddin’s latest collaboration with the filmmaking brothers Evan and Galen Johnsons uses the trappings of a political satire to deliver a heaping load of A-plus gags. Set in the midst of a G7 summit that goes horribly wrong and starring a wonderfully assembled cast of international rascals (including Cate Blanchett as an Angela Merkel type and Roy Dupuis as a perfectly obtuse Canadian prime minister), Rumours turns what could have been a grab bag collection of punchlines into something poetically absurd. (On-demand via Apple TV, Amazon)

Almost entirely shot and set in a frigid and brutalist Winnipeg – or at least an imaginary version of it that feels equal parts Manitoban and Iranian – Universal Language is inspired by writer-director Matthew Rankin’s lifelong fascination with the gentle-touch cinema of such Iranian masters as Abbas Kiarostami. But there is something so distinctly Canadian about the entire affair – which the other week got shortlisted for the 2025 Academy Award for Best International Film – that it feels both homegrown and international at the same time, perhaps the first truly instance of globalized Cancon, engineered in reverse. A hundred bonus points for the most inventive use of Burton Cummings in any movie, ever. (Opens in select theatres Jan. 24)