Over 400 lists were submitted for our annual readers’ poll. I want to thank everyone who participated. This was a lot of fun to work on, and it’s great to see to this site’s readers going against the grain with a lot of their picks.
Sure, “Anora,” “The Substance” and “Dune II” finished in the top 3, but as you can see from the top 20 below, there were a lot of interesting picks that didn’t show up as mightily on critics top 10s, an are completely absent from this year’s awards season, including “Juror #2,” “The Apprentice,” “Civil War,” “Kinds of Kindness” and “Megalopolis” (!!!).
Obviously, some films have only been in theaters for a few weeks, so titles like “The Brutalist” (#6), “Nickel Boys” (#24) and “Nosferatu” (#30) would have most likely fared better if I had waited a few more weeks to conduct the poll.
Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light” (#21), Greg Kwedar’s “Sing Sing” (#23), and John M. Chu’s “Wicked” (#25) were not as well-liked by our readers when compared to critics — all three films are in the top 12 most-listed on our critics consensus results. They failed to crack the top 20.
1) “Anora” (Sean Baker) — 100 lists
2) “The Substance” (Coralie Fargeat) — 80
3) “Dune: Part Two” (Denis Villeneuve) — 78
4) “Challengers” (Luca Guadagnino) — 77
5) “Civil War” (Alex Garland) — 43
6) “Conclave” (Edward Berger) — 42
7) “The Brutalist” (Brady Corbet) — 41
8) “Juror #2” (Clint Eastwood) — 40
9) “Furiosa” (George Miller) — 37
10) “I Saw the TV Glow” (Jane Schoenbrun) — 29
11) “Love Lies Bleeding” (Rose Glass) — 27
12) “The Apprentice” (Ali Abassi) — 26
13) “A Real Pain” (Jesse Eisenberg) — 24
14) “Kinds of Kindness” (Yorgos Lanthimos) — 23
15) “A Different Man” (Aaron Schimberg) — 23
16) “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” (Mohammad Rasoulof) — 22
17) “The Beast” (Bertrand Bonello) — 22
18) “La Chimera” (Alice Rohrwacher) — 22
19) “Queer” (Luca Guadagnino) — 21
20) “Megalopolis” (Francis Ford Coppola) — 20