There are days when I think that Nollywood film critics are too harsh and more days when I think they are not harsh enough: it reflects an inconsistent industry from which the two biggest streamers, first Prime Video and then Netflix, have pulled out — a business many of whose stakeholders seem to not understand that there is no extent of “branding” or trumpeting of “numbers,” no annual feature in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter stalely announcing “the rise” and “arrival” of “African content,” that can make up for improvable quality. So when I debuted this list of “The 10 Best Nollywood Films and TV Series of the Year” last year, I hoped that it would become a key, if non-definitive, resource: a reliable scale of quality based on that indispensable requirement: the efficiency of storytelling.
For the 2024 list, I considered films and TV series released between December 2023 and November 2024. I tried to see every series and film I came across, unless they were shown only in Nigerian theatres or the streaming sites were inaccessible in my location, in which case I tried to request for screeners from the filmmakers. When a film I didn’t see becomes available on streaming, or when it was always available but I just didn’t see it right away, I consider it for the year in focus. It is why, for example, Taiwo Egunjobi’s All Na Vibes (2021) was on our 2023 list, and BB Sasore’s Breath of Life (2023) was considered for the 2024 list. Tracking release dates is tricky, and it is also possible that I might have considered films released after that window.
I like films and series that are coherent or, if not, show vision or, where lacking that, ambition or, without those, at least a consciousness. Few demonstrate all. What I noted is an overdependence on emotional set piece scenes: where a film is uneven or lacking and, suddenly, hits a high with a triumphant scene, a high whose aftermath is meant to obscure the lows before and after it. The problem is not always the writing. It is also the directing.
Honourable Mentions
There is tension in Hijack ’93 — Robert O. Peters’ moving telling of the 1993 airplane hijack by young men desperate to see military-regime Nigeria change but naïve enough to think that even a risk of such scale would do — and each flashback is charged and powerful. Imperfect as it is, it deserves better than being panned. I suspect that its reception has less to do with the actual story and more to do with viewers’ and critics’ unmet expectations. Yet I felt just that with Courage Obayuwana’s Kill Boro, a gang and family drama set in the Niger Delta, which, on paper, should comfortably be on the list proper were it not undermined by such avoidable technical issues as poor sound editing.
A resonant portrait of citizen frustration, Ikechukwu Jerry Ossai’s 3 Working Days sees a man hold up a bank, not to steal but to force them to give him his own money so he could pay for his child’s medical expenses, but his timing is bad. The good script is undermined by direction that allows for no immersion or real depth, and the result is a film that takes up questions and subjects that it is not up to the task of exploring or building their stakes. Frustration also traps the characters in Isioma Osaje’s Japa, in which an overseas-bound young man and a young woman are stuck in a time loop, and in A Father’s Love, whose director Sebastian Ukwa has something refreshing to say about masculinity, a taxi driver’s decision to return a baby left in his car tests his good citizenry — until a DNA result tests his fatherhood.
Zulumoke Oyibo’s The Betrayed begins benignly, as the story of a wife dealing with a cheating husband jailed for murder, then it shifts into an exciting sequence of espionage in the underbelly of Lagos. The husband problem is prominent in the second season of Beyond the Veil, Nadine Ibrahim’s attentive story — aided by some heart and good music despite a halting screenplay — of four young Muslim women navigating love, work, family, friendship, and life in Northern Nigeria. One is the second wife of an abuser, and when she asks the first wife why she still stays with their husband, the senior wife’s response condenses the sense of sacrifice that women put into marriage. “I’ve been with Sadiq for how many years now?” first wife says. “I know how to handle him.” But both wives know that that, having to handle their husband, is the problem.
Daniel Oriahi’s The Weekend, Yemi Morafa’s Aburo, Clarence Peters’ Inside Life, Anis Halloway’s Agu, and Omoni Oboli’s Wives on Strike 3: The Uprising received some acclaim — going by their appearance in What Kept Me Up’ s annual critics’ poll of the best films of the year, which I was unable to take part in — but I did not see them for reasons outlined earlier.
The Top 10
10. Muri and Ko, Biodun Stephen
There are no pretensions in Biodun Stephen’s zestful comedy about a car theft gone wrong, resulting in unintentional kidnap. The plot is straight-forward and the characters are familiar: Muri (Kunle Remi), a loud but kind street thug and petty criminal in his 30s, steals an older woman’s car and jubilantly plans for a better life, until he finds that the woman’s teenage grandson Cole (Fiyinfoluwa Asenuga), whose mother Dinma (Bisola Aiyeola) is a reality TV star, has been asleep in the backseat.
While it borrows some premise from Tsotsi — the 2005 South African drama, directed by Gavin Hood and adapted from Athol Fugard’s novel, that became the first Anglophone African feature to win the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, in which a robber kills a woman, steals her car, and finds her baby in it — screenwriters Ayomide Olatunbosun and Stephen’s minor trick, aside the transposition to a lived-in Mainland Lagos, is in its vantage: the intergenerational and interclass nature of the unlikely friendship that develops between its titular characters. The title comes from Muri’s mispronunciation of Cole’s name as “Ko.” With the police at their back, and new parties taking interest, their unintended adventure becomes a dangerous one.
9. Roses and Ivy, Biodun Stephen
Growing up without a mother figure, but with a good, if stern, father, Evelyn and Roselyn, the two sisters at the center of Biodun Stephen’s heartrending limited series, fall into what seems a preordained order: the more big sister Evelyn steps in to shield little sister Roselyn from reality, the more little sister looks up to big sister, and the harder life turns for big sister, the softer it swings for little sister. The blows come harder when Roselyn (Uche Montana, in fine form in the latter episodes) marries Evelyn’s (Munachi Abii) childhood best friend Lanre (Taye Arimoro), and, in the face of childlessness, the sisters learn just how much their imbalanced bond and dynamic is their undoing.
The script, by Stephen and Abimbola Akin, sets this up by rotating narrative duties, the sisters commenting on their old life from their new standpoints. It is a tensioned, sweeping point-of-view that maintains an emotional scaffolding. Credit for some of the resonant scenes should go to Ladipo Abiola’s camerawork and Adesuwa Amon and Adio Solanke’s editing: Lanre’s frenetic drive home for a timed intercourse with his wife; shot after shot of helpless desperation, in which Roselyn, a woman who has been taking life for granted, confronts her infertility; a teary, shamed Evelyn dragging her sister out of her house.
Although the series stutters with plot inconsistencies as it drives towards its climax, it is stories like it, stories that explore both interpersonal dynamics and societal problems and burrow into the heart, that call back to the emotionally rich flicks of early Nollywood and suggest a way out of the industry’s struggle with authentic storytelling.
8. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Bolanle Austen-Peters
When I profiled Yeni Kuti, the matriarch of the Kuti music dynasty, five years ago, she described her family’s worst moment in 1977, when then head of state General Olusegun Obasanjo’s soldiers stormed their home, angry at her father Fela’s military-mocking song “Zombie,” and threw her grandmother, the legendary activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, from a two-storey building. That incident opens Bolanle Austen-Peters’ biopic, and, fortunately, the film survives the uninspired dramatization and subsequent poor plotting.
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti is saved by its split in chronology: three timelines showing us the woman as a legend and grandmother (played by Joke Silva) in 1977 after the attack, as a leader, wife, and mother (an inspiring Kehinde Bankole) in 1930-50, and as a girl in a majority-boys school (played by Iyimide Ayo-Olumoko) in the 1910s. As she showed in Sista, Bankole is a proven performer who can carry a film regardless of the strength of the writing. She soars in several scenes: in the market fight with the Alake’s guard, during her visit to the Alake when his chiefs make her kneel to address them, and, in one of the best plot beats of the year, when the women break into the Alake’s palace.
It is a triumphant scene — a unity of purpose in Austen-Peters’ direction, Tunde Babalola’s screenplay, Lance Gewer’s cinematography, and Tanja Hagen’s editing that maximizes Leo Omosebi’s production design and the costuming by Folake Akindele, Ituen Basi, and Clement Effanga — and its resonance, alongside those of a few other scenes, is enough to lift the film onto this list.
7. Breath of Life, BB Sasore
It is the 1960s, and Timi, a young clergyman with a messianic career and an exceptional skillset, returns to Nigeria, determined to revitalize the local church. But when he testifies in court against a gang, his wife and daughter are murdered, his life destroyed, and this once bubbly reverend becomes a recluse. Thirty-five years later, another man emerges with a zeal to revive the local church. It is Elijah, his house manager and the film narrator, who appears onscreen 20 minutes in.
A faith polemic disguised as historical drama, an allegory set in what often feels like an alternate realism, the many genre elements of BB Sasore’s Breath of Life make it hard to reduce it to yet another faith-based film undermined by that old genre struggle between artistry and didacticism, even with its inconsistencies in thematic vision and characterization, a range of sharp highs and obvious lows. The film rises because it plays on our need to believe, and, uneven as it is, it works.
It is a large-hearted story that embraces its sentimentalism, roots itself in history, and balances the demands of genre. It succeeds as an exploration of the relationship between two men, mentor and protege, separated by belief systems, class, age, and the hierarchy of experience. Wale Ojo’s Timi is full of dormant rage, but it is Chimezie Imo’s sympathetic Elijah, with his asthma, that is the audience’s eyes into this world, and it is Genoveva Umeh’s Anna, a handful of a woman, that troubles the binary. She is the reason why it excels, and not merely works, as romance, too.
Watching those scenes of Timi throwing omelettes on the wall; and that beautifully shot scene of attempted sex interrupted by asthma, a rare emotional turn that isn’t garish; and Timi walking into the church in realization; watching the interplay of such moments with Kaline Akinugbe and Fisayo Adefolaju’s music and sound work, the significance of the plotting, how igniting it is that the opening narrator is the son but the closing one is the father: I wondered if Sasore’s fusion may have unlocked a different way of telling a Nigerian story onscreen, one embedded in the past but freed from its limitations, adapting as much of it as possible and reaching for those eternal themes of suffering for familial love and redemption in familial love. I received it as an intriguing experiment in Nollywood storytelling, one often framed beautifully by cinematographer Ola Cardoso. Half of its runtime, I cringed. The rest of the time, I smiled. Two times, I stood up and clapped, even though I was watching it alone.
Read a different review by Iheoma Uzomba.
6. House of Ga’a, Bolanle Austen-Peters
The historical Bashorun Ga’a lived during the height of the sprawling Oyo Empire, a renowned Prime Minister and military leader whose fall from grace has been spun into a popular Yoruba adage: If you are brave, venture into wickedness, but if you remember the death of Ga’a, adhere to the truth. While Tunde Babalola’s script for Bolanle Austen-Peters’ meaty drama resists a cardboard absolute-power-corrupts tale and instead attempts to flesh out historical accounts, the film’s success is more a result of brute force and juju than cunning.
The plot crackles with intensity, a medley of action, politics, fraught relationships, and young love. The exciting fight sequences make up for the dull colour grade. But House of Ga’a pulls its punches, distracted by Nollywood’s usual writing problem, and it is partly left to the performances to carry it to its rushed resolution. Femi Branch’s Ga’a has the makings of a truly complex villain and works charisma that anchors the narrative. Tosin Adeyemi is Zeinab, a Nupe woman captured as a slave, in an impressive debut major film performance. And Jide Oyegbile is Ga’a’s ruthless warrior son Olaotan.
The highs of House of Ga’a are in its quality production, with meticulous costuming by Juliana Dede, Yolanda Okereke, and Austen-Peters, the set design by Uchenna Cletus, Badeji Adebayo, and Oluwaseun Casey Osabohien, and the well-done effects. The film advances the Yoruba epic into its own full sub-genre — with the preceding successes of King of Thieves (Agesinkole) and Jagun Jagun.
Read the full review by Paula-Willie-Okafor.
5. A Tribe Called Judah, Funke Akindele and Adeoluwa Owu
Jedidah Judah is a single mother to five very different sons from different men of different Nigerian ethnic groups: Igbo, Hausa, Ijaw, Yoruba, Urhobo. When her kidney disease requires expensive treatment, her sons hatch a desperate plan to steal laundered money from one of their former bosses.
The stunts are choreographed to suit the thrilling sequence of the burglary. As engaging is the score by Tolu Obanro. But even with its artless cinematography and overall lack of a unifying directorial vision, A Tribe Called Judah surges with smooth, natural dialogue, courtesy of Collins Okoh and Akinlabi Ishola’s script, and capable performances from Funke Akindele as Jedidah, Jide Kene Achufusi as the nuanced eldest son Emeka, Timini Egbuson as the layered, cruising thief Pere, and Tobi Makinde as the simple-minded agbero Shina.
A Tribe Called Judah has mighty cumulative power because it echoes reality — merciless healthcare costs, the desperate, often-insurmountable odds experienced by working-class families, the resilient make of the Nigerian spirit — and delineates that the true villain is an unforgiving Nigeria. It is a beacon of thoughtful storytelling and heart in an industry that tends to prize neither, and another testament to Akindele’s keen producer’s eye for stories that matter. Rightly, it became the first Nollywood to gross over N1 billion — proof that Nigerians want good stories that reflect their actual lives.
Read the review by Paula-Willie-Okafor.
4. A Green Fever, Taiwo Egunjobi
Off a lonely forest road in Taiwo Egunjobi’s historical mystery, a man carries his sick daughter and seemingly chances upon a compound deep in the forest, guarded by soldiers. On the radio, we learn there is a curfew and that the country is in a fragile state. The imploring man and his daughter are let in by a young woman, who is both suspicious of him and concerned for his daughter.
Temilolu Fosudo’s mystery guest Kunmi plays off the naivete of Ruby P. Okezie’s colonel’s mistress Matilda, a woman trapped by her man, her dreams of music dashed. He circles her gullibility. While Isaac Ayodeji’s otherwise tight script and, mostly, Fosudo himself almost give away Kunmi’s intention, the film succeeds in its suspense: its ability to keep the viewer guessing and anticipating. Kolade Morakinyo’s sound editing is efficient and Gray Jones Ossai’s score is beautiful and I wish that the song demo by the mistress could be released.
Time attends story in Egunjobi’s films: in All Na Vibes, it is the unbroken present, and in A Green Fever, it is a ticking of history. His direction keeps the story open-ended, counting down.
3. Afamefuna: An Nwa Boi Story, Kayode Kasum
When Afamefuna’s mother brings him to the commercial city of Onitsha, to a businessman called Odogwu to become his nwa boi, his apprentice, young Afaemefuna is introduced to a new world larger than the one he had known in his village. Afamefuna soon forms a close bond with the senior apprentice, Paul, and it is their relationship that drives Kayode Kasum’s triumphant drama of Igbo apprenticeship, which opens in the present day when Paul is murdered, and the love triangle involving the two men and Odogwu’s daughter comes under focus.
Kasum’s direction is tight in the first two thirds. He mines the stakeholder capitalism culture of igba boi for philosophy. Amidst the drama, the story foregrounds the daily life of a nwa boi — in scenes where the boys carry out house chores, scenes where they disagree. Emmanuel Igbekele’s colour grading is brilliant, complementing the general tone and timelines. Anyanwu Sandra Adaora’s screenplay does impressive work reflecting history in the dialogues, highlighting the resilience and communal spirit of Igbo people, post-Biafran War. “The Igbo business collapsed after the war,” Odogwu tells Afamefuna. “Afamefuna, the war did something to us. War is bad.” It is authentic writing.
Most performances rise to the occasion — Stan Nze as the older Afamefuna, Kanayo O. Kanayo as the fatherly Odogwu, and Chidera David and Alexx Ekubo as the younger and older Paul, the story’s best character — and Afamefuna: An Nwa Boi Story’s more obvious trouble with resolution casts no shadow on its victorious cultural storytelling.
Films of Igbo commercial culture like this, films that understand their own anchoring in economic history — and I’ve seen only one more in Genevieve Nnaji’s Lionheart — could inaugurate a genre of the Igbo social epic. This one is expository and entertaining, a satisfactory weaving of tension and humanity that suggests one thing: Kayode Kasum and Anyanwu Sandra Adaora should collaborate again.
It is one of my favourite Nollywood films of all time.
Read the review by Victor Orji Ebubechukwu.
2. A Night in 2005, Temidayo Makanjuola
It is credit to Temidayo Makanjuola’s taut, coherent screenplay and Chinedum Iregbu’s efficient editing that this revenge and social thriller uses tropes and still feels refreshing. On the titular night, a teenage Ife attends a party in an upscale Lagos neighbourhood, and her best friend Ari’s boyfriend Ope rapes her. For years, the adult Ife (Ini Dinma Okojie at her best) carries the pain in silence, until she sees on the news that her attacker Ope (Efa Iwara), the son of the powerful Dada family, is close to becoming governor. Oblivious of the coming doom, Ari (Teniola Aladese) casually tells her on an unrelated issue: “Abeg, when you’ve lived here as long as I have, you’d know that shouting is the only way a woman gets what she wants.”
In the dynamic of Ife’s fiancé Paul (Taye Arimoro) and Ope who ignores him, as well as that of Ife’s social climbing mother Yetide (Bimbola Akintola) and Ope’s mother Anjola Dada (an impervious Ireti Doyle) who keeps dismissing her, the film captures the elite social scene and hierarchy of Lagos and the typical Nigerian chase of association to power.
It is at Ari’s book launch, however, that the keg heats up, and what happens there is orchestrated beautifully and with powerful effect. Cinematographer Barnabas Emordi is in top form: first we see the stares of guests; we don’t hear it the first time but we can tell from those stares that something shocking has happened. Okojie and Doris Uzoamaka Aniunoh, playing Ope’s wife Kelechi, shine bright — a smart casting of the two best young actresses in Nollywood right now. The next beat is brilliant writing: at sea, Ife going online; and the one after that grounds all that freeing action in reality: Ife confronted by her people for her selfishness.
But it is in what happens before Ari’s event that A Night in 2005 earns its plaudits. With tension building, the screenplay gives Ife a break by letting her go to visit her uncle to negotiate their family land in the village. That sub-plot is a well-timed respite from the suffocation of urban Lagos, and those supporting characters — her farmer uncle Baba (Kayode Olaiya) and her niece Funmi (Modesinuola Ogundiwin) — are given their own reality.
Most similarly themed films shrink into activist didacticism, but A Night in 2005 is calibrated to today’s gender and social media climate without ceding artistic integrity to it. “All this foolish wokeness!” Ope rages towards the end. “You females fail to realize what’s going on here? Do you know who I am? What do you think is gonna happen now? Nothing!”
This is what largely happens when a young woman exposes a powerful man, but its polemic is not as obvious as one might think: its polemic is that all those things happen only because there are powerful women behind those men — until other women assume power and force accountability. In 2025 Nigeria, it rings too true, even when the accuser is a powerful woman.
1. With Difficulty Comes Ease, Akorede Azeez
Two scenes define Akorede Azeez’s family grief drama and delimit the two relationships pulling and pushing its lonely protagonist Zainab, a newly widowed designer. In one, Zainab (a grounded Doris Uzoamaka Aniunoh, in a career-best performance) decides to model her own work and asks a male friend, Rayyan (Caleb Richards), to photograph her at a lake park. They are two young Muslims converted from Christianity for near-opposite reasons: Zainab, because she fell in love with her Muslim husband, and Riyan, incredibly, only two weeks to his wedding, forcing his fiancée to leave him. And so they are also two people seeking comfort, Zainab in what she thinks is only friendship, Riyan in what he thinks could become a romance.
During her marriage, Zainab suffered six miscarriages, drawing the spite of her mother-in-law Hajiya (the consistent Ummi Baba-Ahmed), and when she again is pregnant, after her husband’s death, she stays in Riyan’s apartment — Riyan sleeping elsewhere. Hajiya’s discovery of that, and immediate presumption of an affair, is what leads to the second striking scene in the film. Zainab is sitting on her bed and bursts into tears. “Nashide,” she cries. “Nashide.” It is his. The pregnancy is her husband’s. Moved, the hitherto hostile Hajiya kneels before her daughter-in-law, crying with her. They are distrustful of, and yet care for, each other. It is a nuanced depiction of a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law who love and would fiercely protect the legacy of the same man.
I like when Nollywood does stories of unvarnished realism, and With Difficulty Comes Ease reminds me of This Lady Called Life, about another hassled widow actually finding love, but Azeez’s film stays firmly within its characters’ options and allows them priorities. Its stripped-down tenor bares something about the human condition. And how refreshing that, in a country riven by tribe and religion, it gives us a rare perspective: that of an Igbo Muslim woman, a religious minority demographic. It is the most original film on the list.
Next up is our “The 10 Best Acting Performances of 2024.”
Paula Willie-Okafor, Orji Victor Ebubechukwu, and Iheoma Uzomba contributed to this feature via previously published reviews.
To send us screeners for our 2025 list, please email editors@opencountrymag.com.
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