The 43 Best Movies of 2024 (So Far)
1. La ChimeraIt’s not often that I exit a movie feeling utterly enraptured to the point of gratitude. But thank you, Alice Rohrwacher, because La Chimera was such an occasion. The film is centered on Arthur (a magnificent Josh O’Connor), the British leader of a band of Italian grave robbers. Recently released from prison and mourning the loss of a former lover, he stumbles back into his old vice—if you can even call it that. For Arthur, the action doesn’t seem to be the juice; it’s more a means of camaraderie and momentary escape, part of a search for something that no longer exists. Grief, longing, and lively humor course through the film, in which Rohrwacher pulls from fairy tales, history, and a wide range of Italian masters before her. Yet she creates something distinctly her own.
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2. I Saw the TV GlowI loved Jane Schoenbrun’s micro-budget debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. But I Saw the TV Glow is one of the greatest freshman-to-sophomore level-ups I can remember—it’s an example of what promising talents can do when you give them freedom and resources. The film, featuring a shy, TV-obsessed teenager named Owen (Justice Smith), is a coming-of-age story about the nightmarish consequences of personal repression. As brutal as it can be, I also found it incredibly inspiring. By portraying the dire costs of playing it safe, Schoenbrun convincingly makes the case that a conservative approach to life isn’t safe at all.
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3. Last SummerThere has been no shortage of films about May–December relationships over the past few years. And yet the latest entry in the genre, Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, manages to be the most shocking. The film not only pairs a powerful middle-aged attorney with a 17-year-old, but that 17-year-old is also her stepson. And their romance is undeniably steamy, with Breillat never shying away from portraying the immense mutual pleasure involved in the taboo act. As much as there’s perversity throughout the film, though, there are also truth and trust: the truth that being young doesn’t absolve all transgression, and the trust in viewers to know what’s right and wrong and enjoy wading through all the murk.
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4. The Taste of ThingsIs The Taste of Things the greatest food movie ever? If we’re judging by the sheer amount of hunger produced, the answer is a resounding oui! But Anh Hung Tran’s latest doesn’t merely succeed as a drool-inducing extended bit of French food porn. For Dodin (Benoît Magimel) and Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), cooking—and eating, too—is an art, a means of connection, and a way to savor life. In the end, The Taste of Things is equally great as a film about romance and ephemerality.
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5. ChallengersI’ll just say it: I don’t think Challengers is as sexy as advertised. But I’m not mad about it! The film knows what it is, and that’s an incredibly catchy pop song. Beyond the palpable fun that director Luca Guadagnino and his three main players—Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist—are having, what I dig about Challengers is its unabashed goofiness. Guadagnino lets loose, with crazy camera moves, a deliriously throbbing score courtesy of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and the most on-the-nose food innuendo imaginable. The more seriously these characters take tennis—and, more so, rigidity and control—the more ridiculous the movie makes it all seem.
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6. Janet PlanetIn her debut feature, the renowned playwright Annie Baker pulls off a rare feat. Her film makes you feel as though you’ve not only traveled to a specific place (western Massachusetts) at a specific time (1991) but that you’re actually smelling the summer air and feeling the morning breeze. Every production department deserves a lot of credit for the film’s evocative and subtle specificity. Ultimately, more than being about a time or a place, Janet Planet is a movie about two people: a single mother named Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and her precocious and wonderfully idiosyncratic daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler). Baker captures the pair through all their mutual dependency, role reversal, and complex love, as they cross paths with a rotating cast of Janet’s free-spirited friends and lovers.
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7. HereHere, from Belgian director Bas Devos, follows Stefan (Stefan Gota), a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels, as he finishes a job and prepares to move back home. In his final days away, he makes a soup from the remaining food in his fridge and forms a bond with Shuxiu (Liyo Gong), a botanist who works part-time in her aunt’s restaurant. The film is a beautiful, serene meditation on connection and the slow process of change—and an extremely justified celebration of soup.
8. Evil Does Not ExistWith a less nuanced and contemplative director, a title like Evil Does Not Exist might come off as a disastrously didactic, Oscar-baiting screed on the virtue inside all of us. But Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is more interested in our inherent contradictions. The movie is set in a small, rural Japanese village, where residents live in relative harmony with nature. When a cynical glamping company comes to town, that balance is threatened. The company’s arrival leads to one of the great scenes of the year—a public meeting in which townspeople interrogate its representatives—as well as a hauntingly confounding ending.
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9. A Different ManThe notion that it’s what’s on the inside that counts is an age-old cliché and one that A Different Man director Aaron Schimberg expertly twists and tangles in his darkly funny third feature. When an insecure actor named Edward (Sebastian Stan) finds a miracle cure for his facial disfigurement and winds up looking like a leading man, he does indeed enjoy the benefits of his new appearance. But Edward’s internalized notion of self never quite goes through the same transformation, leading him on an absurd, Kafkaesque nightmare that foregrounds the importance of performance. The film constantly upends viewer expectations while critiquing social ones.
10. Sing SingThere probably won’t be a movie this year that affects me quite like Sing Sing did. Set at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, in Ossining, New York, the film centers on a theater group led by Divine G (a brilliant Colman Domingo), a prolific author and playwright who’s been wrongfully convicted. The group is a refuge for the men involved; it’s a rare opportunity for them to reclaim their humanity, be vulnerable, and forget themselves. There are a thousand cliché versions of this particular movie, but director Greg Kwedar largely avoids the tropes and traps of the genre, instead leading with empathy and respect for the characters. Apart from Domingo, almost all the actors actually participated in Sing Sing’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts program. Across the board, they give fantastic performances—a reminder of the talent and capacity of people too often written off.
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Rebel RidgeIf Aaron Pierre does not imminently become America’s biggest action star, Hollywood has failed. In Jeremy Saulnier’s stark, cynical thriller about the corrupt police practice of civil forfeiture, Pierre—whose piercing hazel eyes are nearly as big as his imposing six-foot-three frame—shines as Terry, a stoic former Marine. Of course, the local police made the mistake of messing with him. In spite of some impressive heroics from Pierre, the film maintains a sense of restraint and a skeptical outlook that separates it from your average action fare.
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Red RoomsThere are shades of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Pascal Plante’s unsettling new slow-burn thriller—mainly thanks to the film’s mysterious protagonist, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a dark-web savant who shows up every day at the trial of an accused serial killer. But this is no Hollywood blockbuster. Plante’s film leaves more unsaid. And it rides its dark, eerie, opaque vibe to a finale that is more beguiling than satisfying.
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His Three DaughtersAzazel Jacobs’s His Three Daughters is an actor’s dream of a movie, shot chronologically, in a single location, and full of meaty dialogue and fraught sibling relationships. The context for the movie is that Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), and Rachel’s (Natasha Lyonne) father (Jay O. Sanders) is dying, and they are all staying at his New York apartment until the moment arrives. Coon, Olsen, and Lyonne deliver magnificent performances as three wildly different sisters, fully and maddeningly bringing these three people to vivid life.
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The Front RoomWhen I saw The Front Room, the film’s marketing materials had made me think it was going to be a semi-classic horror movie, perhaps full of possessed bodies or other paranormal activity. What it is, though, is so much stranger and more fun. Directors Max and Sam Eggers—the brothers and sometimes collaborators of Robert Eggers—have created for Brandy’s Belinda an absurd mother-in-law nightmare of a movie, in which Kathryn Hunter (as said mother-in-law) fully goes for it. The Front Room is among the funniest films I’ve seen this year.
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DaughtersThe toll incarceration takes on families is foregrounded in Angela Patton and codirector Natalie Rae’s heartbreaking new documentary. Daughters centers on a program Patton created in Richmond, Virginia, to allow girls and their incarcerated fathers to spend a day dancing together, in formal clothing rather than prison garb. In addition to capturing one of the dances itself, Patton and Rae spend time with the fathers as they complete a vulnerable and reflective ten-week parenting program prior to the dance, as well as with some of the fathers’ families, who have a range of complex responses to the fathers’ absences. Like the dance itself, the film humanizes these men and illustrates the staggering costs of a broken system.
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The BeastBertrand Bonello’s latest was loosely inspired by Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle. But while the author, were he alive today, might recognize some similar themes (loneliness, fear, self-destructive fatalism), The Beast takes the source material in directions James never could’ve anticipated. The film intertwines three separate narratives, in which star-crossed souls (played wonderfully by Léa Seydoux and George MacKay) meet in various time periods: 1910, 2014, and 2044. Whereas the first is a fairly Jamesian Parisian costume drama, the latter two timelines find Bonello exploring thoroughly modern fears: incels and artificial intelligence. Altogether, The Beast is as uneven and indulgent as it is audacious, full of experiments in genre and laced with wry, sometimes melodramatic humor. Since seeing it at last year’s New York Film Festival, I’ve debated whether it’s amazing or horrible, but it’s undoubtedly memorable.
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TrapTrap is just absurdly, beautifully stupid. Josh Hartnett gives the performance of a lifetime as a goofy dad and allegedly great serial killer whom the FBI attempts to catch at a pop star’s stadium concert. One of the most fun times I’ve had at a theater this year. After the horrid Knock at the Cabin, I’m riding for M. Night Shyamalan once again.
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My First FilmIn the aptly titled My First Film, Zia Anger re-creates the making of her doomed—and ultimately never released—first feature, Always All Ways, Anne Marie. The story of the making of Always All Ways (an offshoot of a live performance of the same name) is an unvarnished peek at the youthful naivete, ego, and interpersonal carelessness so often found on no-budget independent sets. But beyond reflecting on her own recklessness, Anger also captures the reverie and rebirth that can come from collaborative creation—as well as the hurdles female creators face from the industry and their peers. It’s a complex, richly layered film that proves Anger to be an artist long overdue for a serious breakthrough.
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Good OneIndia Donaldson’s feature debut centers on a backpacking trip taken by old friends Chris (James Le Gros) and Matt (Danny McCarthy) and Chris’s 17-year-old daughter, Sam (Lily Colias). When I caught the film at New Directors/New Films this past spring, I went into it with some notion of where it was headed. And yet, when the film reached its climactic event, it unfurled with so much subtlety and nuance that I was surprised and affected. Donaldson is a keen observer of the dynamics between fathers and daughters and old male friends. And in Le Gros, McCarthy, and Colias, she found three actors who vividly and distinguishably bring to life three familiar characters.
Between the TemplesHanging over Between the Temples is the death of the wife of Ben Gottlieb (a schlubby Jason Schwartzman). And though there is a pallor to the film—which was shot in upstate New York in wintertime—it is also filled with a chaotic exuberance. After failing to kill himself, Ben reconnects with his elementary school music teacher, Carla Kessler (Carol Kane). He is a cantor, and she is interested in a bat mitzvah. The slightly absurd premise leads to increasingly absurd situations, with Ben and Carla developing deep feelings for one another despite a significant age gap. Shot with Sean Price Williams’s trademark handheld camerawork and edited with a jumpy zeal by John Magary, the film’s frenetic energy produces big laughs, painful cringes, and a complex picture of grief.
