Ten Great Films from 2024 (So Far)
A series of recommendations from the movie year thus far.
The movies are not doing well. Or at least that’s what the box office pundits said when The Fall Guy and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga underperformed last month, proclaiming, once again, the end of cinema for all mankind. These movies are far too expensive, they claimed; they are based on IP that moviegoing audiences couldn’t have cared about whatsoever. Their underpformance led to the worst Memorial Day weekend box office performance in three decades—you could have heard the end-of-days proclamations coming from a mile away. “Audiences don’t go to theaters!” “Streaming services are the future!” “Cinemas are doomed to fail!”
And then both Bad Boys: Ride or Die and Inside Out 2 outperformed their box office projections by a wide margin, turning those same pundits of the apocalypse into pundits of a bounteous future. Suddenly our visions of a terrible future were replaced by dreams of a passionate moviegoing public, all because Will Smith remains a movie star and a puberty-oriented animated sequel managed to outdo their meaningless projections.
I bring all this up simply to say that cinemas have always been a game of risk and reward that can hardly be predicted in the short term. It is easy to lean into manic visions of failure, particularly after last year’s dual Hollywood labor strikes pushed productions and release dates far beyond when they were originally intended. Movies that were supposed to be released last year—like Dune: Part Two, say, or Challengers (both of which were box office successes, I might add)—were pushed to be released this year; others were pushed to 2025 and beyond. Combine that with a general lull in box office numbers—which are down 25% compared to last year, and down a whopping 39% against pre-pandemic numbers—and you have a pretty bleak vision of the cinema industry in 2024. (There’s a reason that “Survive ‘till 25” has become a motto among industry executives.)
Against all that, I am here to tell you that the movies are not just surviving, but thriving. Pundits and critics will continue to focus their cynical energies on the box office downturn, but I would like to turn a more optimistic eye, and issue a critical reminder that good movies are still being made. Great movies are being made, in fact, and at such a rate that I had a hard time creating a list of ten great movies from this year alone. This is not to say that the movie industry isn’t facing significant issues (it is), nor that actions shouldn’t be taken to remedy them (they should). The state of the blockbuster, for instance, is dominated by feckless sequels and remakes, each more soulless than the last; and on the occasion that we do get a star-driven crowd-pleasers, they end up swallowed by the streamers. (Consider Amazon Prime’s The Idea of You, a thoroughly pleasing rom-com starring Anne Hathaway, or Hit Man, which will appear later in this post.)
As I hope the following list will prove, however, great stories are still being told. Cinema isn’t going anywhere, and neither is good art. All it takes is a bit of effort to find the good stuff, and if you are not a 200-movie-per-year obsessive like I am, then I hope this list provides you with a shortcut to quality entertainment.
Without further ado, please enjoy the following list of Ten Great Movies from 2024 (So Far).1
Honorable Mention: Hit Man
Right up until its nigh-catastrophic ending, Hit Man is on a par for being the most entertaining movie of the year. In the starmaking performance that he has long deserved, Austin’s very own Glen Powell plays Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered and cat-loving psychology professor at the University of New Orleans who also moonlights as an undercover operative for the NOPD. When Gary is ushered into the role of portraying fake hit men (done to solicit confessions from unwitting suspects), he begins to unlock a new side of himself. Along the way, he meets Madison (Adria Arjona), and the two begin to fall in love. But is Madison falling in love with Gary, or with his concocted hit man persona? It’s a fantastic premise for a multi-genre movie, and writer-director Richard Linklater likewise mines it for all its worth, turning Hit Man into a neo-noir, a rom-com, and whimsical art film all at once. The ending, unfortunately, is woefully bow-tied and glib, and undoes much of the work that came before. Were it not for that, Hit Man might have been ascended past the rank of Honorable Mention.
Hit Man is available to stream on Netflix.
Ten Great Movies from 2024
Challengers
It’s hard to envision the words “tennis” and “sexy love triangle” flowing naturally together in the same sentence, but thanks to playwright Justin Kuritzkes and director Luca Guadagnino, the writer-director team behind Challengers, we don’t have to. A propulsive saga of sleazing and pleasing extending the course of thirteen years, Challengers centers on best friends and professional tennis players Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist) who share an obsession with tennis megastar Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), whose beauty and singular commitment to success proves to be their undoing. Zendaya’s acting talents are far outpaced by O’Connor and Faist, though her ubiquitous stardom is well-suited to the role of an athlete at Roger Federer-like levels of dominance. Her presence also helps center the film’s atmosphere of lusty courtside ferocity, which is accentuated by the year’s best musical score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross—a four-on-the-floor techno album that pushes Challengers’ steamy narrative in an impellent, absorbing direction.
Challengers is available to purchase on most major platforms, and will soon be available to stream on Prime.
Civil War
Alex Garland’s vision of American dystopia is an alarming one—and not just it portrays a world in which Texas and California are in political alignment. Civil War stars Kirsten Dunst as Lee Smith, a photojournalist traumatized from years spent documenting war-torn conflicts, and a woman dedicated to photographing the film’s authoritarian US president (a Trumpian Nick Offerman) before his imminent demise by insurgent rebels. Joined by a cast of adrenaline-junkie journalists (played brilliantly by Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Cailee Spaeny), Lee’s journey from New York to D.C. is marked by a revolving door of terrifying episodic encounters each of which represent a new facet of American polarization. The most revealing of these involves a knockout performance from Jesse Plemons as a Loyalist militiaman, who asks the film’s most pointed question: “What kind of American are you?”
Civil War is available to purchase on most major platforms.
Close Your Eyes
Before Close Your Eyes, the Spanish director Victor Erice had made a total of three films since his career began fifty years ago with 1973’s The Spirit of the Beehive—a film that is regularly considered among the greatest ever made. To say that this film bore the weight of expectation, then, is certainly an understatement. But much like Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Close Your Eyes pulsates with the quiet power of a filmmaker at the end of his life, reflecting on that which came before. The film concerns the mysterious disappearance of actor Julio Arenas (José Coronado) some twenty years prior, a case that Julio’s old friend Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), a film director who filmed Julio in an uncompleted film, comes to revisit during the course of the film. An intimate, at times unbearable act of personal filmmaking, Close Your Eyes is a masterful consideration of cinema and its transportive power, and a lamentation for its ever-continuing degradation.
Close Your Eyes will have a limited theatrical release later this summer.
A Different Man
A pitch-black comedy with a playfully cruel edge, A Different Man is the most exciting film of the year, if not simply for its unpredictability. The film centers on Edward (Sebastian Stan), a man with severe insecurities and equally severe facial disfiguration, each of which is informed by the other. When Edward participates in an experimental medical procedure, he sheds his disfigurement to reveal Sebastian Stan’s hunky mug lurking beneath his facial tumors, a miraculous transformation that provides him with cars, clothes, money, and women—turning him into the different man of the film’s title. Whether or not this external transformation means anything of actual significance is the film’s chief concern, and writer-director Aaron Schimberg asks this question with a mischievous cynicism that might be hateful if it were in lesser hands. But Schimberg’s script, the best of the year so far, is constantly wrong-footing its audience, forcing us to reconsider whether Edward’s changing appearance or his unchanging insecurities are the features that define him. A Different Man features a career-best performance from Stan, a brilliantly narcissistic turn from The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve, and a show-stealingly loquacious performance from Adam Pearson, an actor with the actual facial disfigurement that Stan only wears through prosthetics and makeup.
A Different Man will release theatrically later this year.
Dune: Part Two
Dune: Part Two belongs in the conversation with the original Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings trilogies for its worldbuilding abilities, and Denis Villeneuve deserves all the credit in the world for turning Frank Herbert’s Dune—one of the most thematically and narratively exhaustive science-fiction universes ever put to pen—into a $700 million global box office phenomenon. The continuing saga of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) continues in the immediate aftermath of its predecessor, with Paul and his pregnant mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) stranded in the wilds of the desert planet Arrakis with the indigenous Fremen, who envision Paul as their messianic savior. Unlike the first film, which focused almost exclusively on systems of power and the means by which they rise and fall, Dune: Part Two is instead about belief, and the wielding of systems of belief to powerful ends. The film is all the richer for it, brought to bear by a graduating class of young movie stars including Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, and a cameo appearance from Anya Taylor-Joy, plus a series of veteran turns from Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Christopher Walken, Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem, and Charlotte Rampling.
Dune: Part Two is currently streaming on Max.
Evil Does Not Exist
A humanist drama, observational documentary, Lynchian art film, and eco-fable all rolled into one, Evil Does Not Exist defies definition. This latest film from Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi (the enigmatic talent behind 2021’s Oscar-winning Drive My Car) sets its sights on Mizubiki, a hamlet in the Japanese countryside threatened by the arrival of a Tokyo tourism corporation that wants to install a glamping site in the heart of the village. The locals unanimously oppose the measure, sparking a low-flying conflict between the urban and the rural. Hamaguchi flits between characters with the aimlessness of a winter wind, emphasizing the panoramic ineffability of the natural world, as does Eiko Ishibashi’s free jazz-inspired musical score.
Evil Does Not Exist is currently playing in limited release.
The Fall Guy
What else are we supposed to ask for from a blockbuster movie? Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, two movie stars at the height of their powers, star in a genuinely entertaining action-romance romp with great stunts, funny banter, and hoenst-to-God movie star chemistry. In The Fall Guy, Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a Hollywood stuntman who, after breaking his back during a stunt gone wrong, abandons his on-and-off relationship with Jody Moreno (Blunt). Eighteen months later, Seavers is called back to set to do stunts on Moreno’s directorial debut, a hilariously kitschy sci-fi Western hybrid. What unfolds is the perfect summer blockbuster blend: action and romance in equal measure, non-CGI stuntwork with the power to wow, and Ryan Gosling getting to be his effortlessly funny Canadian goofball self. And it flopped at the box office!? Shame on you—yes, you—for not going to the theater to watch this perfect piece of popcorn nonsense. Your father and I are both tremendously dissapointed in you.
The Fall Guy is available to rent on most major platforms.
I Saw the TV Glow
The best film of the year so far is Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a horror-forward egg narrative and a magnificent work of sustained existential terror. The film tells the story of Owen (Justice Smith), a shy child whose interest in watching The Pink Opaque, a monster-of-the-week Nickelodeon show that walks the line between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks, is limited by domineering parents who have set a bedtime well before its 10:30 PM showtime. But when Owen meets Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a sullen girl two years his senior, he finds himself invited to a sleepover with the opportunity to watch it, and what follows is a woozy, unnerving, and genuinely transcendent tale of identity, dysphoria, nostalgia, and the villainous confines of suburbia. No film from 2024 has the dissociative power of I Saw the TV Glow, and I would be surprised if anything manages to top it by December.
I Saw the TV Glow is available to rent on most major platforms.
Love Lies Bleeding
A desert-set neo-noir dripping in steroidal muscle sweat, Love Lies Bleeding is the sort of pulse-pounding thriller that, despite its being made in 2024, feels plucked straight out of the late-80s milieu in which it is set. Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a reclusive New Mexico gym manager whose blue-collar macho setting is upset by the arrival of Jackie (Katy O’Brien), a female athlete bumming her way to a Vegas bodybuilding competition. The two fall in love at the same rate that they fall into a world of drug deals gone bad, terrifying father figures, and steroidal psychosis, all of which becomes wrapped together in a thrillingly intense moviegoing experience. The film is directed by Rose Glass with a psychedelic forcefulness that is well-suited to its iron-pumping environs, and is elevated by deranged performances from Dave Franco, Anna Baryshnikov, and Ed Harris.
Love Lies Bleeding is available to rent on most major platforms.
Perfect Days
Toilet cleaning has never been more peaceful than in Perfect Days, a Tokyo-set drama from German director Wim Wenders. The film stars Kōji Yakusho as Hirayama, a man content spending his days cleaning the high-end Tokyo Toilet, listening to old Patti Smith records, and reading William Faulkner novels before bed. Hirayama hardly speaks, yet his interactions with others are always marked by genuine acts of kindness. He lends money often, gives out cassette tapes, listens when someone needs hearing. Perfect Days is defined by its serene atmosphere. There is almost no narrative to speak of, save for sparse details that we learn about Hirayama’s past over the course of the drama. Yet it is from these details that Perfect Days derives much of its emotive power, which build cumulatively to the film’s remarkable final image—an image which is, like the rest of the film, centered on Yakusho’s intimate and multi-faceted expression.
Perfect Days is currently streaming on Hulu.
All films on this list must have had a US theatrical release in 2024, or will have theatrical release in 2024. This is why movies like A Different Man and Close Your Eyes are allowed here: They have not yet had a US premiere, but are scheduled to do so before the end of the year.
Would've loved to see Anyone But You on the list but fantastic list nonetheless!
Movies will survive, reviews/rankings from a well seasoned movie obsessive will help:) I do count on you to separate the wheat from the chaff. Your list has several that I will pursue. Many choices - want my time to be rewarded by talented acting and compelling stories.