The 60 Best Movies of 2024

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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Ramell Ross’s liberal adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer-winning novel is the most visionary work I’ve experienced in some time and one of the most affecting. The film maintains the novel’s premise: A bright young Black boy named Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp), living in the Jim Crow–era South, is sent to the Nickel Academy after hitching a ride with a man who turns out to be a criminal. There he faces unspeakable abuse, prejudice, and injustice. But Ross fully embraces the tools of cinema, using the subjective form to audacious and powerful effect. His immersive, impressionistic approach puts the viewer directly in not just Elwood’s perspective but also his friend Turner’s (Brandon Wilson) and, later, those of their older selves. The reality and fact of what exactly happened isn’t totally clear, but the tragic feeling is overwhelming—and in capturing that emotion, Ross gets as close as he can to the truth.

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 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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I 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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No movie this year has swept me off my feet quite like The Brutalist did when I saw it at New York Film Festival. As a director, Brady Corbett’s foremost gift may be motion. His latest film hurtles through 30 years in the life of Hungarian-born architect László Tóth (peak Adrien Brody) with an intoxicating sense of momentum—carried forth by Daniel Blumberg’s steadily swelling score, by precise cuts, and by powerful shots of zooming vehicles. Corbett’s primary preoccupation across this three-and-a-half-hour epic is patronage, with a superb Guy Pearce playing a rich Pennsylvania industrialist named Harrison Lee Van Buren, who commissions Tóth to build an ambitious community center.

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 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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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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Robert Eggers’s films excel at their ability to balance seeming contradictions. They’re dark and grounded but also surreal and comical, pop hits with highbrow aspirations, at once adult and puerile. And Nosferatu—to my mind, Eggers’s best film yet—is no exception. Eggers’s take on F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic is equally erotic and repulsive, haunting and spry. He brings the world of 19th-century vampires to vivid and striking life, with phenomenal sets, exhilarating theatrics, and one incredible vampire (an unrecognizable Bill Skarsgård).

Sex and money are not the same as love, but in Anora it’s easy to see how they could produce delusions. Ani (an electric Mikey Madison), a New York stripper who knows both how to please and how to fight, is no naïf. She’s in the business of bringing men’s fantasies to life. But when Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), aka Vanya, a Russian oligarch’s goofy, spend-happy young son, showers her with expensive gifts, big wads of cash, enthusiastic sex, and affection, it becomes hard for her to resist giving in to her own fantasies of true love and a lavish life. Sean Baker is one of American cinema’s great cultural observers—an expert at finding interesting people and burrowing into subcultures at the margins—so it’s no surprise that this improbable love story doesn’t have a fairy-tale ending. The ending it does have, though, is knotty and far more interesting.

When time slows down and things take a turn toward the surreal in the second half of Payal Kapadia’s exquisite new drama about two nurses living together in Mumbai, the transition is so seamless that the imagined events feel as natural as everything that preceded them. That’s testament to Kapadia’s sure hand. Her film similarly connects the mundane and the extraordinary, the personal and the political, with a gentle ease that’s as rare as it is delightful.

If you were wondering what life looked like in Israel-occupied Palestine before the conflict escalated to all-out war this year, consider No Other Land. The film—made by a four-person Israeli-Palestinian collective—focuses on the southern West Bank community of Masafer Yatta, from 2019 to 2023. During that time, we see the IDF continually attempt to force the Palestinians living in the area out of their homes and the region. The events are often brutal and heartbreaking, as when Israeli soldiers shoot a Palestinian villager (a cousin of one of the filmmakers) at point-blank range. For the filmmakers—and the Masafer Yatta community—persistence and documentation is the only means of resistance. Throughout No Other Land, the filmmakers reckon with how difficult and slow it is to effect change. Most likely, their film won’t inspire any major turning points in the conflict. But on the other hand, it would be hard to watch this documentary and not feel a deep, galvanizing sense of injustice and pain.

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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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There probably wasn’t a movie this year that affected 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 clichéd 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.

The 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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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 also slowly wears away at you, mimicking the sense of overstimulated exhaustion we’ve become inured to.

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India 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.

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Hanging 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.

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