The 30 Best Movies of 2024 (So Far)

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 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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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 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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There 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 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 coursing through the film, though, there’s also truth and trust: the truth that being young doesn’t absolve all transgression, and trust in viewers to know what’s right and wrong and enjoy wading through all the murk.

Is 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 Eugenie (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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I’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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In 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.

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 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.

With 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 Ryusuke 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.

After seeing Love Lies Bleeding, a friend remarked on how uncannily some details of 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 its 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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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. 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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The plot of Lucy Kerr’s feature debut is essentially there in the title. We find a large extended family gathered together at a massive estate in Texas, and they can’t seem to coordinate well enough to all pose for a group picture. Kerr’s primary interest in the film is frames—each shot is drawn out and exquisitely composed—both for what they contain and what they miss. The closest the family comes to taking that portrait is in the pre-title intro. They’re dressed up with Santa hats in front of a lush green backdrop, and you can tell that if they all smiled and said cheese, they’d give the impression of an all-American family. But as the film progresses and we see them from more angles, an atmosphere of dread and dysfunction quietly builds, undercutting the idyllic domestic archetype.

The number of rich starring roles available in movies tend to diminish as actors—and especially actresses—age. In Thelma, June Squibb gives a performance that makes that seem like a mistake. As Thelma Post, a tenacious 93-year-old clinging to her independence, Squibb is at once a relatable grandmother and a comic action hero. After she’s scammed out of $10,000, Post embarks on a mission to retrieve her money and prove that she’s still capably self-sufficient. If the film occasionally veers into predictable cliché, that tendency is overshadowed by what a fun and affecting ride it is.

Few movies are as in touch with what it feels like to be a teenager as the Ross brothers’ latest, which is so real and raw it might fool you into thinking it’s a documentary. The film follows a small group of young, rowdy teens from modest means on a road trip across Oregon, out to the coast. As inevitable troubles arise and plans are thwarted, it’s the unexpected encounters that prove most meaningful. In other hands, that all might make for an unbearably clichéd story, but the Rosses dig deep and tap into the vibrant fringes.

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If you go into Hit Man expecting a movie about a ruthless hired gun, you’ll be sorely disappointed—though perhaps not as disappointed as one of the poor saps who tries to hire a hit man and instead meets an undercover agent posing as one. In his adaptation of Skip Hollandsworth’s 2001 Texas Monthly story about a college professor named Gary Johnson who moonlighted as a fake hit man, Richard Linklater mixes screwball comedy with a meditation on how people change. There may not be much in the way of slick kills, but there is a lot of breezy fun.

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It’s impossible not to think of Mad Max: Fury Road while watching that film’s new prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. But if you put aside all the hype, what you’re left with is one of the very best big-budget action movies since… well, Fury Road. George Miller’s latest installment in the Mad Max franchise is a high-octane, pedal-to-the-metal dystopian thrill ride in its own right, featuring a couple of unbelievable set pieces, a barrage of dizzying cuts, and one scene-stealing schnoz.

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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…”

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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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 any manatee or muskrat. 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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I had some issues with this Neo Sora–directed concert film—it felt like it ended several times before it actually did, and though it’s gorgeous aesthetically, the 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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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. Packed with satisfying performances from a new generation of stars, the film is a tremendous spectacle that even manages to produce a few good laughs.

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