The best movies of 2024 (so far)

A great artist can offer a radical new perspective on a well-trodden subject. So it is with Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust masterpiece, which takes Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ and shows us what banal evil really looks like. The family life of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller) is a vision of cursed domesticity. The horrors remain out of sight but, crucially, not out of earshot. Sound designer Johnnie Burn’s soundscape has the yelling of guards and the crack of rifle shots punctuating scenes of gardening and kids’ playing. The result is a Come and See for the 2020s.

Sensual coming-of-age journey on helium or problematic story of sexual exploitation? The conversation came late to Yorgos Lanthimos’s singular adaptation of Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s cult 1992 novel, but it came pretty hard. And yet, with Dogtooth, The Lobster and The Favourite behind him, the Greek is a master of creating lopsided, not-for-everyone visions of the human experience – and this Victorian Frankenstein riff, in which a magnet Emma Stone plays a lustier-than-normal version of the monster, is no exception. Surely the most bonkers film to score 11 Oscars nominations.

Does Denis Villeneuve ever miss? He’s certainly hitting close to .400 when it comes to blockbuster moviemaking – and his first proper sequel keeps that hot streak alive. Having done the heavy lifting of reimagining Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic in the first Dune, Part Two adds moral complexity and giant desert battles to the world-building and galactic scheming. But even the ludicrously starry cast can’t compete with those monstrous sandworms – giant Tube trains careering through the sandy substrata of Arrakis that give this awe-inspiring movie its most awesome motif.

A flooring piece of work – in the sense that it will leave you sobbing on the cinema floor – Andrew Haigh’s ghostly love story could just be the Brit’s masterpiece. It’s the story of a screenwriter (Andrew Scott, wonderful), whose lonely life in a London apartment block is interrupted by a mysterious neighbour (Paul Mescal, all dangerous charm) and an even more mysterious visit to his childhood home, where his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) are there to meet him. It’s at least semi-autobiographical – remarkably, Haigh shot it in his own boyhood home – and that makes its undercurrents (connection, loneliness, and just really missing mum and dad) feel personal as well as universal.

Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, her old flame IRL, combine to dizzyingly romantic effect in Tran Anh Hung’s Cannes-prize-winning period piece. The Scent of Green Papaya man delivers what’s basically ‘The Intoxicating Aroma of Flash-Fried Loin of Beef’ in a movie so in love with the sensuous pleasures of food, its opening 30-odd minutes of Nigella-style sizzling, chopping, roasting and saucing that it might leave you gnawing your arm in hunger. And in the spirit of great foodie films – Babette’s Feast, Big Night, Tampopo et al – it’s about more than just the culinary arts. Binoche is luminous as a gifted cook whose tender bond with the man she works for (Magimel) is entirely on her own terms. With its rural, 19th century setting, it’s a swooning time machine to past pleasures.

A hard-scrabble adventure story, Matteo Garrone’s (Gomorrah, Tale of Tales) tale of two gangly Senegalese boys trying to make it to Italy by land and sea is bleak and bruising one minute, transcendent and magical the next. Despite desertscapes straight out of a David Lean epic, it never sugarcoats the migrant experience. Far from it – Seydou and Moussa, played with huge charm and increasing trepidation by Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, suffer deeply for their dreams of a better life. It’s a sensitive, stirring and hugely relevant film that’s well worth searching out on the big screen.

You don’t have to like wrestling, or Zac Efron, or know anything about the true story of the Von Erich family to be hit like a piledriver powerslam by Sean Durkin’s no-holds-barred ‘70s and ‘80s-set drama. Efron, bafflingly untroubled by awards attention, physically transforms to play Kevin Von Erich, one of four siblings (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White is another) driven by their wrestler-turned-trainer father (Mindhunter’s Holt McCallany) beyond physical and emotional human limits. Go in cold if you can; the less you know, the better.

That sound you hear – some mild grousing, a bit of ‘no fucking Merlot’ – is the Giamatti hive assembling. For so long one of cinema’s most underappreciated (appreciated, just not enough), he’s emerged from Alexander Payne’s bittersweet ’70s-style Christmas movie as a popular hero of the kind that would probably make a few of his own characters sick. His spiky chemistry with newcomer Dominic Sessa, as a sour history teacher and the troubled student he’s stuck with over the vacations, and the upbeat support of Da’Vine Joy Randolph, make this Payne’s most oddly life-affirming movie.

Surely no film in 2024 will have a more bamboozlng ending than Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s rural fable. If the Drive My Car director, one of Japan’s finest purveyors of gentle human dramas since Ozu, goes fully mystical in the final reel, the lead-up offers a painfully relatable tale of ecology and capitalism at loggerheads. A Tokyo business’s insensitive plan to build a glamping site on a virgin patch of countryside shows how easily the balance between people, as much as the natural world, is disrupted. But it’s Hamaguchi’s ability to gift each of its characters an inner life that makes this quiet gem special.

The plot of Mongolian writer-director Zoljargal Purevdash’s Cannes-selected first feature may be nothing special – a teenage boy’s gift for physics could lift his struggling family out of poverty – but when every aspect of a film is so perfectly curated and calibrated, from performances to music to cinematography, it becomes something truly extraordinary. The setting may be icy, the story bleak at times, but the warmth shines through.

Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda’s humane lens is applied to another intimate-but-universal parable of lives in flux and embroidered with a gentle score by the late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto. Actually, it’s several lenses, because Monster takes a turn for the Rashomon when it reframes its story of a supposedly abusive teacher, struggling pupil Minato (Soya Kurokawa) and his anxious single mum from different angles, each non-judgmental but increasingly knotty. It won the Queer Palm at Cannes for its sensitive depiction of the growing bond between Minato and his school friend Eri (Hinata Hiiragi). In an Anatomy of a Fall-less year, it might have won the Palme D’Or too.

The ’90s was full of films that rinsed laughs from the soul-destroying tedium of McJobs – Office Space, Clerks, et al. But even the most gifted filmmakers have struggled to alchemise the zero-hour horrors of late capitalism into jokes, leaving the terrain clear for social realists like Ken Loach instead. Romanian maverick Radu Jude delivers a daring, starkly funny exception. His blackly funny road-trip through the gig economy collages Andrew Tate TikTok send-ups, film history homages, and a sharply observed takedown of modern working life through the eyes of Ilinca Manolache’s spiky, twentysomething production assistant doing the shift from hell. The result is the kind of bold jab at corporate bullshit that would have Peter Gibbons nodding in approval. 

If movies are empathy machines, as Roger Ebert put it, Ava DuVernay’s travelogue is the highly calibrated kind. It’s a meta-narrative of a kind – an imagining of the creative process behind Pulitzer-winner Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 book ’Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents’ – and one with major intellectual heft, but it’s also deeply moving: confronting with stark truths about systems of oppression and consoling with moments of quiet romanticism from the Selma director. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s (King Richard) is wonderful: warm but unsentimental as a questing woman who is wounded by personal grief but galvanised by historical injustice.

A magnificently windswept Mads Mikkelsen heads into the hostile wilds of Jutland in this epic Scandi western set in the 18th century. He’s tasked with cultivating the unforgiving landscape on behalf of the King – only for his aristocratic neighbour (Simon Bennebjerg, flamboyantly odious) to turn up and start torturing people. It’d make for a satisfyingly old-fashioned tale of good against bad, except that Mikkelsen’s settler has some bastard in him, too. Minimalist but magnetic, the great Dane is almost as spectacular as director Nikolaj Arcel’s widescreen landscapes.

In Cinderella, a young girl escapes a life of drudgery by meeting a dashing prince and living happily ever after in his castle. Sofia Coppola’s portrait of Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) is that in reverse. The gross imbalance of power in the young Priscilla’s relationship with the controlling Elvis (Jacob Elordi) is the thing that #MeToo movements are built on, and few filmmakers can wield this mix of the dreamy and dark-edged with Coppola’s levels of emotional precision. Here, she made a horror story dressed up as a fairy tale.

Giving glorious new meaning to the phrase ‘cinema trip’, this meditative voyage through sound and space challenges your senses by exploring life, death and reincarnation as it follows the transmigration of an elderly soul from Laos to Zanzibar. With a cast of non-actors, naturalistic camerawork, some colourful lap dissolves, and an intense ‘keep your eyes closed’ interlude, Spanish filmmaker Lois Patiño has crafted a playful and potent sojourn into the metaphysical.

If the end product wasn’t so entertaining, it might be a bit depressing to watch a 2001 race satire become one of 2024’s most culturally relevant movies. But the message of Percival Everett’s seminal novel ‘Erasure’ – that African-American artists are pressured to present the Black experience as a ghetto-based tragedy – finds the perfect expression in Jeffrey Wright’s career-best performance as author Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, an author who sets out to expose that system only to get dragged deeper into it. The supporting turns, especially from Sterling K Brown as Monk’s troubled brother, add real pathos to the laughs.

Any film that draws comparisons with Abbas Kiarostami is automatically a grabber. Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s meta-doc has an Oscar nomination to its name, too. Both endorsements feel richly deserved: her daring, playful and emotionally charged film turns expectations on their head as it pieces together the real story of four siblings and their stern but matriarch Olfa. Except nothing – and no one – is quite what they seem here. The result is a mesmerising hybrid of filmmaking trickery and emotional authenticity that’s as gripping as any mystery-thriller.

In the latest film by celebrated yet underrated Mexican director Michel Franco (Sundown), Oscar winner Jessica Chastain gives a restrained, pitch-perfect performance as a New York social worker Sylvia, a single mum and recovering alcoholic whose encounter with a man (Peter Sarsgaard) suffering from early-onset dementia brings memories up to the surface so quickly, she experiences an emotional equivalent of the bends. The irony is typical of Franco’s sparse, authentic oeuvre, and Jessica Harper is icily brilliant as Sylvia’s estranged mother, whose own repressed memories have spread like a cancer in her family.

Add another brilliant Jodie Comer performance to the list in this very British disaster movie. She plays a new mother trying to survive when ceaseless rain makes much of the UK uninhabitable and causes society to collapse. We’ve seen a lot of the story beats before, but, ironically, the mundanity of the disaster – which initially just looks like your average November in London – makes this particularly chilling.

So far, it’s been a year of seasoned filmmakers – Ava DuVernay, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Wim Wenders, Denis Villeneuve – strutting their accomplished stuff. But there’s been new names to clock, too, including, of course, American Fiction Oscar-winning writer-director Cord Jefferson. But don’t sleep on French-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s debut either, a quietly simmering story of poisoned love in a rural West African village. It’d be reductive to describe it as a Senegalese ‘Romeo and Juliet’, but it dances gracefully along similar faultlines: how the expectations of a traditional community and the dreams of two of its lovelorn members make for a tragically combustible mix.

Aussie filmmaking brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes give a winningly creepy David Dastmalchian the perfect platform in a diabolically fun Satanic possession shocker set on a ’70s talk show. A possessed tween is wheeled onto the show with her wary parapsychologist to give Jack Delroy’s ratings the kiss of life. Needless to say, it has the opposite effect. The gore spurts liberally when it all goes south, but it’s the nicely observed ensemble of media figures, and the Cairnes’s smart riffs on Network and The King of Comedy, that gives it texture to go with the terror.

A wild mix of Thelma & Louise, Pumping Iron and Nicolas Winding Refn’s neon-noirs, Saint Maud’s Rose Glass delivers the sort of erotically-charged thriller we’ve all been missing – while also feeling like something else entirely. Kristen Stewart is a bored gym manager in 1980s New Mexico whose life is upended when an uber-jacked drifter (Katy O’Brian) wanders into her dead-end town. It’s the odd details that make it: the flashes of hallucinatory horror; the close-ups on bulging muscles; the mortifying hairdos. But for all the blood, sweat and steroids, Glass never forsakes the queer love story at the movie’s heart. Not that she ever could: Stewart and O’Brian are far too magnetic.

A film made in the image of its subject, this punky, scrapbook-style doc tells the story of London’s legendary Scala Cinema, the kind of they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to temple of cinema – and, you know, general shenanigans – that your local multiplex couldn’t emulate without being shuttered in minutes. It’s the kind of place that people queued for all-nighters and emerged changed forever, and not just by the fug of weed smoke. Many of those Scala-rites are reassembled here to share giddy reminiscences. Some of them now have influential moviemaking careers of their own.

Los Delincuentes (‘The Criminals’ in Spanish) is no more a heist thriller than L’Avventura is a manhunt movie. Sure, it starts with a Buenos Aires bank clerk opportunistically nicking $650,000 from his own bank’s safe, but from the moment he entrusts the loot to his wary colleague to hide it and hands himself into the police, the genre trappings begin to come apart in all kinds of digressive and surreal ways. There are detours into the rich Argentine countryside, two love affairs – with the same woman – and a fourth-wall-breaking for the ages. It’s like a bit queuing for a rollercoaster and finding yourself in the hall of mirrors: irksome for some, but a treat for anyone willing to go with the flow.

A windswept and Stone Aged ancestor of Neil Marshall’s supremely discomforting caving horror The Descent, the taut terrors in Andrew Cumming’s debut film come thick and fast. A small band of early settlers traverse a bleak Highland landscape, only to start dying mysteriously – and fairly violently – at the hands of a demonic presence in the woods. The Scottish director knows what to show and what not to, giving us bursts of disorientating carnage and sharp jabs of unsettling sound design. The cast, speaking a made-up but highly plausible-sounding Paleolithic dialect, put meat on the bones of that lean premise with lived-in performances, and while the reveal drains some of the momentum, the final scenes provide an expectedly thoughtful finale.