The 27 Best Movies of 2024 (So Far)
Why isn’t anyone going to the movies? That’s the big question coming out of Hollywood right now, following the worst adjusted Memorial Day weekend at the box office in nearly three decades and a dismal May overall. The most disappointing new release was George Miller’s latest installment in the Mad Max franchise, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The film debuted to a $32 million opening weekend, far below projections (and what it needs to recoup its $168 million budget). What’s unnerving isn’t that a big blockbuster is underperforming, but that a big blockbuster as good—and downright entertaining—as Furiosa is. The film is a blast, it’s built from revered IP, and it sports two new big stars (Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth). So, what gives?
Frankly, I don’t have an answer. But what I do know is, box office be damned, 2024 is shaping up to be a pretty solid year for new releases. In addition to Furiosa, this month we got an ideal movie to watch with the whole family (Hit Man), a thrillingly scrappy teen road journey (Gasoline Rainbow), and a quietly staggering meditation on humanity’s relationship to the natural world (Evil Does Not Exist).
Challengers
I’ll just say it: I don’t think Challengers is as hot as advertised. But I’m not mad about it! Challengers 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 dug 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 result is that 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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The Beast
Bertrand 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. While 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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I Saw the TV Glow
I loved Jane Schoenbrun’s microbudget 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 a testament to what promising talents can do when you give them freedom and resources. The film, which follows 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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The People’s Joker
Vera Drew’s satirical DIY spin on superherodom’s most exhausted characters is so visually and referentially chaotic—mixing forms, switching names, and gleefully messing with the powers that be—that it can be easy to overlook what an affectingly personal work it is. At the heart of this future-set, no-rules, community-woven collage is Drew’s story of gender transition and comedy evolution. It takes issue with improv’s first rule of “Yes, and…” and proves there’s a lot of gold to be mined from “No, but….”
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Spermworld
In his follow-up to Some Kind of Heaven, director Lance Oppenheim proves once again to be among modern documentary’s great humanists. He has a knack for finding colorful characters within eccentric subcultures and capturing them in a way that is curious and nuanced. In Spermworld, the subculture in question is black-market sperm donors. By spending time with a few serial donors, we learn about their various motivations and how what they do breeds both connection and conflict in their lives.
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La Chimera
It’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 could 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. In the film, which is coursed by grief, longing, and lively humor, Rohrwacher pulls from fairy tales, history, and a wide range of Italian masters before her—and yet creates something distinctly her own.
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Dad & Step-Dad
Tynan DeLong has compared his feature debut, Dad & Step-Dad, to a nature documentary. Indeed, it borrows the form’s slow, serene pacing and meditative music. But in observing a 13-year-old named Branson (Brian Fiddyment), his dad (Colin Burgess), and his stepdad (Anthony Oberbeck) on a woodsy weekend getaway, DeLong shows that the human male is much stranger than your manatee or muskrat. And yet despite heavily spoofing the awkwardness and toxicity of modern masculinity, this is a film that has a lot of love for its imperfect subjects.
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Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus
I had some issues with this Neo Sora–directed concert film—it felt like it ended several times before it actually did, and though gorgeous aesthetically, its crisp black-and-white cinematography calls to mind an Apple commercial. Ultimately, these are minor quibbles. The bottom line here is that Sora brings the viewer into intimate contact with Ryuichi Sakamoto as he performs a profoundly touching swan song.
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Dune: Part Two
Isn’t it great when the most anticipated blockbusters of the year mostly live up to the hype? Like Barbie and Oppenheimer last year, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune sequel is about as good as you could hope for from this notoriously tricky-to-adapt property. The film is a tremendous spectacle—packed with satisfying performances from a new generation of stars—that even manages to produce a few good laughs.
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The Taste of Things
Is The Taste of Things the greatest food movie ever? If we’re judging by the transparent 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 Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), cooking—and eating, too—is an art, a means of connection, and a way to savor life. Ultimately, The Taste of Things is equally great as a movie about romance and ephemerality.
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Here
Here, 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 out of the remaining food in his fridge and forms a connection 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.
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Free Time
In Free Time, Ryan Martin Brown subverts your traditional movie structure by giving his hero what he wants right off the bat. During a meeting with his supervisor, Drew (played by Colin Burgess) surprises himself by quitting his job in an effort to savor what’s left of his youth. But lacking direction—or similarly unemployed friends—Drew’s newfound freedom quickly becomes a burden of its own. The film is a comedy—and a very funny one at that—but if you’re among those who can relate, its discomfort might just verge on horror.
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Apolonia Apolonia
If you follow anyone around with a camera for long enough, you’ll probably observe some interesting things. That’s true of the young French painter Apolonia Sokol, whom Danish doc-maker Lea Glob spent 13 years filming. Through Glob’s lens, we see Sokol grow as an artist and as a woman, build community, navigate the art world, and process loss. Sokol’s story provides plenty to chew on—about family, art making, and modern womanhood. And it helps that Sokol is an extraordinarily captivating screen presence.
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The Promised Land
Mads Mikkelsen’s performance in The Promised Land, from Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, immediately ranks as one of my favorites from him. In the 18th-century-set drama, he plays Captain Ludvig Kahlen, a poor Danish war veteran who tries to elevate his status and ingratiate himself with the king by growing crops on the vast, forbidding Jutland Heath. In addition to the elements, Kahlen faces adversity from the current nobility, particularly a diabolical aristocrat named Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg). Arcel makes great use of Mikkelsen’s mesmerizing visage. And the director gives The Promised Land such fine pacing that, even as he portrays great agony, watching the film is never a struggle.
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Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
Vietnamese director Pham Thien An has a gift for photographing his home country—both the city of Saigon and the vast rural land surrounding it—through wide shots that slowly pan and zoom. There’s a quiet, searching quality in the cinematography that’s echoed in the narrative. The film follows Thien (Le Phong Vu), a young man whose sister-in-law just died in a motorcycle crash and whose brother long ago abandoned the family. Without any sense of clear direction, Thien casts about, both in the present and through memories, for meaning, faith, God, and his brother. If his quest offers frustratingly little in the way of solid answers, it raises plenty of questions—and better yet, leads to many potent encounters.
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Totem
Totem, from The Chambermaid director Lila Avilés, is such an evocative expression of the extraordinarily specific and intense stew of feelings that comes when celebrating an end. The film is largely told from the perspective of Sol (Naíma Sentíes), a seven-year-old girl who is spending the day at her grandfather’s house, where the family is getting ready to hold a surprise party for her sick father. The buildup to the party is slow—giving Avilés the chance to paint subtly shaded portraits of the various family members—and results in a powerful climax.
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The Settlers
This revisionist western from Chile’s Felipe Gálvez is equally visually arresting and experientially brutal. The film follows an unlikely trio on a voyage through Patagonia as they violently clear the Indigenous people off the land on behalf of the powerful man who owns it. In depicting the birth of his homeland, Gálvez interrogates narratives around colonialism and its ugly, often absurd realities.
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Perfect Days
There’s a danger of fetishization in a movie about a blue-collar worker whose Zen approach to life turns, say, cleaning toilets into a serene calling. And the endeavor only gets more precarious—stinky, even—when the film is funded by Japan’s controversial Nippon Foundation. But the meditative rhythms of Wim Wenders’s latest put me in an alluringly meditative trance, and Perfect Days ultimately felt less like propaganda for Japanese tourism than an argument for paying attention to the abundant beauty in the everyday. That and analog rock ’n’ roll cassettes, which I now desperately want to accumulate.
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Pictures of Ghosts
Not so long ago, Recife, one of Brazil’s largest cities, was a thriving cinematic destination. It boasted several vibrant movie theaters and was an outpost for major Hollywood studios. But you wouldn’t know it from walking around the city today. There’s barely a trace of Recife’s cinematic past, as Kleber Mendonça Filho shows in this poetic film essay. A native of Recife, Mendonça Filho reflects on change, both in his own life and in his home city. Pictures of Ghosts is a testament to the power of film for recording history but also for warping it—and how memories of life events blur into memories of movies.
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Occupied City
Steve McQueen’s Occupied City is so long (clocking in at four-plus hours) and dense (it feels even longer) that if you see it in a theater, you’ll get a brief intermission. The break is perhaps necessary for endurance, but it’s most useful for reflection. Over images of present-day Amsterdam, narrator Melanie Hyams tells the history of each space—and the people who occupied it—during the Holocaust. You get the point—that the city bears little trace of this defining atrocity—early in McQueen’s tour. But as the film goes on, McQueen gradually fills in the picture, giving your mind plenty of time to ponder all of the implications.
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Love Lies Bleeding
After seeing Love Lies Bleeding, a friend remarked on how uncannily some details in the interiors recalled her childhood home in New Mexico. I hadn’t clocked the kitchen tiling myself, but I was struck by the vibrancy of director Rose Glass’s 1980s American West. Even as Glass—who, by the way, is British—takes liberties with hair, gore, and human size, the film maintains a palpable attention to detail and period specificity. Which is to say: Throughout this thrilling, pulsating neo-noir, you always feel like you’re in good hands.
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Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
I’m not sure I’ve seen a movie that better reflects this moment in late-stage capitalism than Radu Jude’s grim, exasperating, and darkly funny Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Not only does Jude mirror and reference real people and events and break down the dynamics at play; his film slowly wears away at you, mimicking the sense of overstimulated exhaustion we’ve become inured to.
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
What we know: George Miller’s Fury Road prequel is coming! It’s set decades before the events of the previous Mad Max—and 45 years after the apocalypse—and will star Anya Taylor-Joy in the Charlize Theron role.
Why we’re excited: Fury Road set the world on fire (in both senses), and we’re ready to go as far into the godforsaken desert as Miller wants to take us.
Release date: May 24
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