The Best Movies of 2024 (So Far)

Horizon: An American Saga, Part One

The first part of Kevin Costner’s sure-to-be massive western epic feels like the opening chapters of a grand novel patiently rolling into place, carefully delineating characters and offering telltale glimpses into their lives. (Part two is in the can and will open in a couple of months; parts three and four are currently being filmed. Whether we’ll get to see them in theaters may depend on how the first two chapters fare financially.) This part of the film is rich in period detail and filled with majestic vistas that seem to match the expanse of its story. But this can be a curse, too, at least while the picture exists as just this one installment: The power of those big, sweeping, novelistic stories (think Lonesome Dove) lies in the ways we watch those characters change, in how fate brings them together and pulls them apart. Something of this size needs a shape, and right now Horizon is basically just a rising line. While the movie doesn’t entirely work on its own, what’s onscreen is mostly promising and bodes well for future installments. The stately pace never feels boring. It’s a gorgeous, sprawling, and at times moving blast of old-fashioned storytelling — even if, for now, it’s just half (or maybe a quarter) of a movie. —Bilge Ebiri

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Horizon: An American Saga, Part One.

Last Summer

No director is better suited to making an uneasy movie about an older woman and a younger man than Catherine Breillat, France’s reigning provocateuse, who with Last Summer makes a triumphant return to filmmaking after a decadelong break. Léa Drucker brings a fascinating flintiness to her character, Anne, a lawyer whose work representing young victims of sexual abuse doesn’t stop her from falling into bed with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher). Anne and Théo come together in the dreamlike bubble of summer, but the film gets more interesting when the real world intrudes on their idyll and Anne proves that, in order to protect herself, she’s capable of wielding the same language used to discredit the victims she represents. —Alison Willmore

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Last Summer.

Green Border (June 21)

Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border forces us to confront raw human behavior shorn of all niceties and posturing. Her epic new film tackles the European refugee crisis from several angles as a game of uniquely cruel political football is played between Poland and Belarus with real, terrified humans — most fleeing wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa — caught in the middle. Built around exhaustive research into real-life incidents, the cruelties inflicted on people in this picture are beyond evil: starving refugees forced into bribes and robbed blind; thirsty men forced to drink broken glass; children torn from their families; sick old men beaten to a pulp; a heavily pregnant woman tossed over a fence like a sack of potatoes; the freezing and the wounded left to die in the cold. Holland is a humanist, not a sadist, so she doesn’t dwell on these actions. But she doesn’t flinch from letting us witness such horrors amid the intimate urgency of her filmmaking. Her structure replicates the process of dehumanization these people go through. Thus, the film’s form forces us to confront our own inaction. It’s an unforgettable movie in all senses of the word. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Green Border.

Janet Planet (June 21)

Annie Baker’s wondrously delicate directorial debut manages to be equal parts mysterious and relatable — a portrayal of restless adulthood as seen through the eyes of a girl on the cusp of adolescence. As Lacy, who spends the summer adrift at home after finagling a way to come back from camp early, Zoe Ziegler is an achingly accurate 11-year-old whose anxieties about the future are balanced by a beyond-her-years solemnity. But it’s Julianne Nicholson who gives a career-best performance as Lacy’s aging hippie mother, Janet, whose love for her daughter doesn’t eliminate her need to keep looking outward for meaning — a quest that leads to a string of lovers and friends coming through the western Massachusetts cabin she and Lacy share, each visitor shedding new light on the relationship between mother and daughter. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Janet Planet and Jackson McHenry’s interview with director Annie Baker.

Thelma

Writer-director Josh Margolin’s film follows a 94-year-old woman who goes on a quest to locate the crooks who scammed her out of $10,000. Somehow, it manages to be so charming and heartfelt that the laughs never feel lazy, cheap, or cruel. It’s anchored by a delightful performance from June Squibb, a marvelous actor who has never gotten a lead role like this; she turns what is otherwise a pretty simple, cute setup into something far more profound. The protagonist’s quest to find the people who did this to her becomes about more than righting a wrong or getting her money back; it’s a way to prove to everyone (and herself) that she still has agency in her life. That doesn’t stop Margolin from riffing on spy movies and action flicks. One of Thelma’s inspirations is the spectacle of Tom Cruise sprinting across the rooftops of London in Mission: Impossible — Fallout. For her, he becomes a symbol of persistence and resilience in one’s advancing years, and for us, she becomes the same. There’s a compelling universality to the film: As the world spins ever forward, we all wind up out of touch with it soon enough. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Thelma and Rachel Handler’s interview with star June Squibb.

Ghostlight

I wandered into Ghostlight early one afternoon this past January at the Sundance Film Festival. I didn’t know anything about the picture; I urge you to see it that way as well. But if you do need more information, here goes: The movie follows one traumatized family, in particular the father, Dan (Keith Kupferer), a burly, easily distracted road-crew worker with a hot temper. One day, after another one of Dan’s blowups at work, a curious woman, Rita (Dolly De Leon), beckons him into the semi-abandoned storefront where she and a ragtag group of actors are busy rehearsing a no-budget amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. He’s soon drawn to the easy camaraderie of this makeshift theater troupe and the elegant power of Shakespeare’s prose, even though he admits he doesn’t understand any of it. For much of its running time, the film only hints at what’s actually troubling Dan and his family. It’s not a secret, exactly — the clues are pretty easy to put together — but the revelation of their tragedy still hurts like a kick to the teeth. For all the muted realism of its performances and its everyday milieu, Ghostlight plays at times like a kind of spectral fantasy. Or more accurately, like one of those experiences when real life briefly feels like it has edged into a spectral fantasy. In the end, it becomes a film about the world-changing power of artistic communion, about how creativity, compassion, and forgiveness — of oneself and others — are all pit stops on the same human journey. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Ghostlight.

Robot Dreams

Pablo Berger’s animated adaptation of Sara Varon’s 2007 book, the story of a dog and its pet robot in mid-1980s New York, was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar earlier this year. But its hand-drawn, fablelike style, along with its entrancing and melancholy beauty, feels old-fashioned in a contemporary animation world largely defined by clutter and smarm. With zero dialogue, the film follows a lonely dog (known simply as Dog) who purchases a robot companion by mail. Dog assembles Robot, and the two of them proceed to spend a wonderful summer in the overcrowded, sweaty city. But then they’re suddenly separated, and their lives diverge. The always awkward Dog finds another companion while Robot has encounters with the rest of the world that are sometimes dreams, sometimes real. Though the story seems to take place over the course of one year, we see New York change around these characters as well. Watching Robot Dreams, we find ourselves reflecting on how our own lives have changed as we’ve grown: the friends we’ve left behind but haven’t forgotten, the cities that have transformed around us, the wisdom we’ve accrued, and all the ways in which we’re still slightly damaged from all that living. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Robot Dreams.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

A prequel, a revenge tale, and even something of a bildungsroman, George Miller’s prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road follows the travails of the young Furiosa (played as a child by Alyla Browne, an adult by Anya Taylor-Joy) as she’s kidnapped by a motorcycle warlord named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and later traded off to Immortan Joe (the villain of Fury Road, here played by Lachy Hulme, in slightly younger, less pustule-filled form). Until now, the characters in the Mad Max films — yes, even the children — have arrived mostly fully formed, their minds and attitudes shaped by this dead world. Here, however, we watch a bright, young innocent lose everything that has ever meant anything to her, and her heart hardens. A pall of hopelessness hangs over the movie as we absorb the lessons of the wasteland along with our heroine. But the film is also thrilling in its own right. Action sequences charge forward and build and build, casually leaving all manner of bodies in their wake. The director also indulges his fondness for yarn-spinning, as he did in his previous film, the masterful Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022). It might not be a huge hit, but it’s nice to know that, after all these years, George Miller seems determined to stay true to his mad self. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga; Ebiri’s close look at the ending; Fran Hoepfner’s chat with actor Tom Burke; and James Grebey on Dementus’s cape.

Hit Man

“How many of you really know yourselves?” Philosophy lecturer Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) posits this question early on in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. “What if your self is a construction, an illusion … a role you’ve been playing since the day you were born?” It turns out that he’s about to become a walking answer to the question, as this amiable, bird-watching Everyman pretends to be an assassin for the New Orleans police department’s sting operations. As a fake hit man, Gary is effectively playing a figure out of our collective imagination — and that liberates him. He can make up the character as he sees fit because the people he’s playing quite simply don’t exist. Hit Man works simultaneously as an indulgence in and a deconstruction of the basic transaction of stardom: It presents us with a guy we can never be, then makes us believe for a moment that we can be him, even as it tells us that such a guy doesn’t exist in the first place. If Glen Powell’s not already a star, this picture might well make him one. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Hit Man.

Kidnapped

A number of filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, have over the years attempted to adapt the remarkable true story of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish boy in Bologna who was taken from his family by papal authorities in the mid-19th century and raised as a Catholic. But it’s perhaps appropriate that the film was finally made by the legendary Italian director Marco Bellocchio, a man who has spent his entire career questioning the power of social institutions. Bellocchio is also a master of depicting the way madness functions in families as both an external and internal force. In the sweeping, melodramatic Kidnapped, he shows not just what happened to Edgar, but also the toll it took on his family. It’s a multicharacter saga that is at once thoroughly entertaining and thoroughly terrifying. —B.E.

I Saw the TV Glow

Haunting, unsettling, and so emotionally raw it feels like an open wound, Jane Schoenbrun’s film is an exploration of dysphoria, suburban isolation, and the imperfect refuge that is fandom. It’s easy to see traces of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks in The Pink Opaque, the dreamy supernatural drama that outcasts Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) fixate on and bond over in high school. But while the show’s mythology seeps into their lives and serves as a metaphor Owen steadfastly refuses to acknowledge, the most compelling moment is the one when, a little older, Owen revisits the source of his obsession and finds that it’s nowhere near as compelling as it was in his memory. Pop culture can serve as a life raft and a refuge, but Schoenbrun’s film makes it achingly clear that Owen has to take the steps necessary to save himself in the real world. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of I Saw the TV Glow; Esther Zuckerman’s interview with filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun; and Rachel Handler’s interview with Caroline Polachek about her song for the soundtrack.

Gasoline Rainbow

The latest movie from the Ross brothers is another freewheeling creation inhabiting a limbo between fiction and non, where first-time cast members play characters inspired by — but not confined to — their own lives, improvising scenes within the boundaries of a scripted scenario. In Gasoline Rainbow, the story takes the form of a road trip to the coast embarked on by a group of five longtime friends fresh out of high school, though the journey is less about the destination than it is the picaresque adventures the group experiences along the way, as the kids meet rail-hopping crust punks, nautically-inclined skateboarders, and Lord of the Rings-loving metalheads. It’s ragged and exhilarating, like taking a hit right off the feeling of being 18 and sure your true self is out there, waiting to be discovered. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Gasoline Rainbow.

Evil Does Not Exist

The quietly wandering, elliptical quality of the early scenes in Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist might feel like a departure from the Drive My Car director’s recent and best-known work. We spend time with widower Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who lives with his daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) and makes a living doing odd jobs in and around the village of Mizubiki, chopping firewood, harvesting plants, collecting water from the springs for the local ramen joint. The peaceful life of this village is interrupted with the arrival of two representatives from a talent agency that’s planning to open a “glamping” business nearby. In the film’s most bravura scene, a presentation to a group of locals devolves into an extended confrontation when the villagers begin to ask questions about a variety of concerns, most notably the placement of the site’s new septic tank, which is too small for the number of expected customers and also upstream from the town’s fresh-water source. Evil Does Not Exist rings unnervingly true in its particulars, from the bizarre bedfellows created by modern capitalism to the quiet contempt with which city folk treat poorer villagers. But Hamaguchi also doesn’t give us obvious villains, instead portraying different people from different worlds, each trying to survive in their own way. Even so, in its own discreet, modest way, the film leaves us with a haunting sense of a personal and ecological apocalypse. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Evil Does Not Exist and Rachel Handler’s dispatch from the Venice Film Festival.

The Fall Guy

David Leitch’s action-comedy mystery romance set in the world of stunt professionals is an act of pure movie love, mixing and matching genres while tossing off in-jokes and references to its illustrious (and not-so-illustrious) forebears. Ryan Gosling, whose comedic talents were criminally undervalued until last year’s runaway hit Barbie, gets to flex them again here, bringing his deadpan, affably dim charm to the role of Colt Seavers, a hot-shot stunt double for megawatt movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). After an accident seems to end his career, a forlorn Colt gets a call to come perform a stunt on the Sydney set of a new flick being directed by Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), the woman he once loved, and is sucked into a shaggy-dog missing-persons case. The stunts are spectacular and Gosling is very funny, but maybe the most surprising thing about the film is how genuinely romantic it is. Blunt and Gosling have splendid chemistry — the kind of onscreen magnetism shared by people who are not just insanely hot but also simply know how to look at each other. The film invests us in wanting Colt and Jody to get back together; we’re willing to accept any ridiculous situation so long as it reunites them. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The Fall Guy; Ebiri’s behind-the-scenes look with the stunt team; and Ebiri’s conversation with director David Leitch.

Alam

The conversations around Palestine and Israel often don’t leave much room for nuance, but Firaz Khoury’s moving coming-of-age film offers a corrective. Not everyone realizes that there are Palestinians in Israel, living in Palestinian neighborhoods, going to schools with Palestinian teachers — but they’re taught Israeli history, seen from Israel’s perspective, all under an Israeli flag (alam is an Arabic word for banner). So they learn about Israel’s battle for independence, even though for them it’s known as the Nakba — the “catastrophe,” in which their families were displaced in 1948. In Alam, a group of middle-class students wrestles with romance, authority, and political awakening in the days leading up to Israel’s Independence Day. These are kids with means and prospects, with families and teachers who want them to keep their hands clean. To them, the political (and physical) battles being waged over their homeland sometimes seem abstract, and yet they can’t help but look for ways to be involved. This is a marvelous, mesmerizing film that offers no easy answers. —B.E.

Challengers

It’s sexy, it’s sweaty, it’s mean, and it’s just so fun — Luca Guadagnino’s tennis romance is one of the year’s treats, a film that revels in the baby-movie-star qualities of leads Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor, and Zendaya, allowing them to be larger than life even as their characters act hopelessly petty. A BDSM drama as told via sporting events, Challengers manages to make tennis look hot and to make the romantic maneuvers among the three characters into athletic competitions. All that, an oomph-oomph score, and a finale that includes shots from the POV of the ball? What did we do to deserve this, and how do we do it again? —A.W.

➽ Read Angelica Jade Bastién’s review of Challengers; Matt Zoller Seitz’s review of Zendaya’s movie performance; and Joe Reid’s explanation of who won in the ending scene.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

Joanna Arnow’s feature directing debut is an unclassifiable deadpan comedy about a Brooklyn woman, Ann (played by Arnow herself), whose entire life seems to revolve around humiliation: She’s in a sub-dom relationship with an older man whose reluctant, disaffected approach to her needs might be part of their whole thing; she endures constant awkward conversations with her parents (played by the director’s own parents); she’s completely ignored at work even when she’s being given an award. There’s a surreal quality to the film, and yet it all feels so true. Arnow has captured something about the authentic and mortifying absurdity of modern life — and she’s done it in a thoroughly entertaining way. Her filmmaking style is episodic, but not in the exhausting, indulgent style of so many other plotless dramedies: Her vignettes vary from extended sequences to comically brief snippets, giving the picture a unique and irresistible cadence. —B.E.

Civil War

What makes Alex Garland’s controversial new film so diabolically clever is the way that it both revels in and abhors our fascination with the idea of America as a battlefield. The film is set in what appears to be the present, but in this version of the present a combination of strongman tactics and secessionist movements have fractured the United States into multiple armed, politically unspecified factions. Smoke rises from cities; the highways are filled with walls of wrecked cars; suicide bombers dive into a crowd lined up for water rations; death squads, snipers, and mass graves dot the countryside. How we got here, or what these people are fighting over, is mostly meaningless to the journalists covering this war, who gather in hotel bars, get drunk, and loudly yuk it up with the jacked-up bonhomie we might recognize from movies set in foreign lands like The Killing Fields, Under Fire, and Salvador. They’re mostly numb to the horrors they’re chronicling. The movie’s lack of a political point of view has received some understandable criticism, but the conceit here is to depict Americans acting the way we’ve seen people act in other international conflicts, be it Vietnam or Lebanon or the former Yugoslavia or Iraq or Gaza or … well, the list goes on. It doesn’t want to make us feel so much as it wants us to ask why we don’t feel anything. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Civil War; Matt Zoller Seitz’s interview with director Alex Garland; and Roxana Hadadi’s essay on the movie’s final shot.

In Flames

Could we call In Flames, Pakistan’s submission for last year’s Best International Film Oscar, a horror movie? How could we not? It looks at the life of a young Karachi woman whose world is upended after the death of her father: Men stare at her, attack her, obsess over her, ignore her. The prying eyes of a patriarchal society see her as both victim and prey. A brief, seemingly promising relationship ends in tragedy. She’s pursued by haunting visions as she begins to lose the line between reality and illusion. Director Zarrar Khan depicts both supernatural shocks and real-life terrors with the same jump-scare-laced bravado but does so without ever shortchanging the very real drama at the film’s heart. —B.E.

The Beast

Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi epic is Henry James by way of David Lynch, a beguiling, slippery creation that spans three time periods and settings, and that manages to constantly surprise and unsettle. As Gabrielle, Léa Seydoux is a tragic costume-drama heroine, a stalkee in a horror film, and a frustrated seeker in an aloof futurescape, and she manages to create a sense of continuity over these very different lives, into which Louis (George MacKay) inevitably appears. The Beast is wistful, scary, and unsettling, and more than anything, it’s a big swing — a movie about being afraid of vulnerability that is itself fearless. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of The Beast.

The First Omen

Directed by Arkasha Stevenson, this prequel to 1976’s The Omen is another modern horror movie that speaks to our current moment even as it tells a fantastical story rooted in the past. In this case, the year is 1971, and young novitiate Margaret Daino (Nell Tiger Free) has just arrived in a turbulent Rome to work at an orphanage. She becomes intrigued by the odd, introverted Carlita Skianna (Nicole Sorace), one of the orphans. She sees something of herself in the girl and tries to forge a bond with her. Then a rogue priest warns her that Carlita might have been bred by the church specifically to give birth to the Anti-Christ — this is, after all, an Omen movie — and our protagonist becomes determined to save the girl. The film will surely leave you with more questions than it answers, but like the best studio horror directors, Stevenson understands that we’re not here for logic. The movie is soaked in style and mood with images that are both textured and shocking and that tap into tantalizingly visceral fears. If horror is all about loss of control, about feelings of helplessness conjured in the audience to reflect the helplessness of the characters, then this is a true horror film. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The First Omen.

La Chimera

Alice Rohrwacher’s film follows Arthur Harrison (Josh O’Connor), a strange man with a strange gift for robbing graves, finding and lifting the antique knickknacks the ancient Etruscans of central Italy used to bury with their dead. A former archeologist, he seems haunted by his own exploits, and this occasionally rambling, often gorgeous film’s queasy dream logic suggests that we’re watching a man halfway between this world and the next, struggling to find his place. Rohrwacher, one of Italy’s foremost filmmakers, makes earthy movies with a dash of what we might call magical realism. The performances are naturalistic, the location shooting authentic and ground level, but the stories often hover on the edge of fantasy. The director fills the picture with folk ballads, naif art, playful asides to the camera, and bursts of sped-up slapstick, giving it all the quality of a ramshackle operetta. But O’Connor’s concave, melancholy demeanor undercuts the picture’s levity, likely by design: The more the film goes on, and the more fanciful it becomes, the more Arthur seems unable to reconcile himself to the world around him. He’s a sad, walking embodiment of the notion that those who spend their time worrying about the next life will never feel peace in this one. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of La Chimera.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Caustic and brilliant, Radu Jude’s latest is a comedy about the terrible absurdity of life under late capitalism that includes among its wide-ranging reference points classical haiku, Goethe, the German schlockmeister Uwe Boll, and a series of profane TikToks records by its main character, an overworked PA named Angela (Ilinca Manolache). Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World consists primarily of Angela’s encounters as she drives around auditioning possible subjects for a company employee safety video, a worker-blaming production made even more absurdly bleak by the fact that Angela has been putting in such long hours she’s in danger of falling asleep on the road. But woven in, brilliantly, are clips from a communist-era film about a female taxi driver, also named Angela (Dorina Lazar), whose state-sanction dramas under the Ceaușescu regime provide a counterpoint to the present day Angela’s gig economy life, until the two characters converge for the final act, which involves the shooting of the corporate production, and is one of the most blackley funny sequences you’ll see this year. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus

A few months before he died in March 2023, Ryuichi Sakamoto recorded what he suspected might be his final solo concert. It had been created across a few days out of prerecorded segments that were then assembled and streamed around the world. An expanded version of that concert now exists as a feature film directed by the late musician’s son, Neo Sora, and it’s a moving, spare, and self-reflective work. Sakamoto was a savvy and thoughtful performer, always aware of his audience and in playful conversation with them. Now, as he communes with his music, we feel like we may be intruding on a private requiem. He doesn’t seem particularly frail during this performance; the fragility lies in the music, in the vulnerability with which he plays it, and in the austere cinematic presentation. The shimmering black-and-white photography and elegant camera moves heighten the intimacy of the performance. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus.

Dune: Part Two

If the first Dune was Timothée Chalamet’s movie, the second belongs to Zendaya, and it’s better and more emotionally accessible for it. Denis Villeneuve’s Frank Herbert adaptation continues to be a spectacular and genuinely alien epic about genetically engineered messiah figures, space witches, massive sandworms, and BDSM-inflected goth fascist planets. But it’s Zendaya’s character, the Fremen warrior Chani, who provides the film’s heart, as a fierce-hearted rebel who’s won over by Chalamet’s Paul despite knowing better, and despite being aware that he’s saying all the right things to win her community to his side for what may be his own purposes. Dune: Part Two has incredible sweep, but it also manages to have recognizable human drama, and that comes entirely from Chani’s perspective as the representative of a people whose own desires are forever subsumed by the machinations of much larger powers. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Dune: Part Two; Matt Zoller Seitz’s behind-the-scenes look with cinematographer Greig Fraser; and Roxana Hadadi’s analysis of the ending.