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Though some high-profile duds may have given the impression that the year in film is off to a rocky start, our list of the best movies of 2024 so far reveals a wealth of worthy, (mostly) smaller fare released since January. Some may be considered the best movies streaming, while others are playing in theaters (or soon will be). We’ll keep updating this list all year, so be sure to check back in the coming months for more recommendations of movies to watch in between Traitors seasons.
dFlights.
Green Border
Venerable Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s furious, heartsick look at the refugee crisis at the Poland/Belarus border is grim but galvanizing. We watch in horror and alarm as people fleeing war and poverty are used as pawns in a brutal political fight, left to wander swampy forests in search of care and compassion. They find it on occasion, as Holland turns her focus to the principled activists who risk their own freedom and safety to help their fellow humans. Green Border won a prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival and was then roundly decried by members of Poland’s conservative government. The film is its own acting of daring in that way, a polemic and a cri de coeur that damns its targets and rattles viewers out of complicit inaction.
A24.
Sing Sing
A gentle, intimate film about prison and rehabilitation, Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing focuses on the titular prison’s arts program, in which incarcerated men learn and perform theater, gaining new perspective on themselves and the world in the process. Colman Domingo is the lone professional actor in the film, gracefully embodying a wrongly convicted man tending to the flickering flame of belief that he will one day be exonerated. His castmates are all formerly incarcerated men, playing versions of themselves with the specificity and clarity of lived experience. Sing Sing is uplifting but not in the manner of typical Hollywood cliché. It’s instead sober and soft-spoken, and all the more compelling for it.
Skywalkers: A Love Story. Ivan Beerkus, Angela Nikolau in Skywalkers: A Love Story. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024.Netflix.
Skywalkers: A Love Story
Jeff Zimbalist’s documentary is part dizzying account of a daredevil feat (or, really, lots of daredevil feats) and part study of the influencer economy. The film follows so-called “rooftoppers” Angela Nikolau and Vanya Beerkus as they prepare to illegally summit a mega skyscraper in Malaysia, risking life, limb, and love. The footage of their mission is tense and exhilarating, and the domestic scenes—two young people of fierce pride and conviction trying to make a relationship work—are no less engaging. But what really hooked me was the film’s mapping of influencer pathology, its insights into the risks and rewards of monetizing oneself. Skywalkers is a strikingly modern movie in that sense, enlightening and a little chilling.
Smudge Films.
Good One
If one of the hikers in Old Joy brought his teenage daughter along on the trip, it might look something like India Donaldson’s biting little character study. Lily Collias plays a college-bound girl enjoying a camping trip in the Catskills with her dad (James LeGros) and his ne’er-do-well friend (Danny McCarthy). She watches with passive interest as the two old buddies tease and bicker and let the various messes of their lives spill out into what is meant to be an amiable weekend. A frisson of danger gradually enters the picture, but it’s a slight one. Donaldson is not trying to make a heavy drama, nor a thriller. Good One is a pensive and effective mood piece about a liminal time in adolescence, when the adult world begins to reveal itself in all its tricky, complicated dimensions.
Sony Pictures Releasing/Everett Collection.
It Ends With Us
An improvement on source material the likes of which we rarely see, this big, sentimental romantic drama handles its difficult subject matter—namely, domestic abuse—with surprising sensitivity and nuance. However embattled they were then or are now, director Justin Baldoni (who also acts in the film) and star Blake Lively have made a commercial, broadly appealing movie with pure Hollywood finesse. Lively has never been better than she is as the unfortunately named Lily Bloom, a florist still processing past trauma as she realizes that the man of her dreams may actually be leading her back into a terrible cycle. Jenny Slate offers fine support in the funny best friend role, while Brandon Sklenar is appropriately hunky as a rugged, decent man from Lily’s past. It Ends With Us is premium-grade, refreshingly mature melodrama, with or without the tabloid rumors.
Netflix.
Daughters
A moving documentary about a program that unites incarcerated men with their daughters for a dance, Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s Daughters also concerns the harrowing failings of the justice system. The film is hopeful and shattering at once, and mightily benefits from the virtue of patience. Rae and Patton followed their subjects for years, allowing the film to encapsulate an epic sprawl. What results is a poignant portrait of lives interrupted, hanging in stasis even as time swiftly passes.
Music Box Films.
Mountains
A promising debut from director Monica Sorelle, Mountains is a spare film about family and community. Atibon Nazaire plays Xavier, a Haitian immigrant living in Little Haiti in Miami, working a construction job and trying to ensure that his teenage son stays on the right path. Surrounding this family is the lurch of supposed progress, as their neighborhood is gentrified and becomes increasingly alienating. Sorelle paces her film calmly and deliberately, relying on quiet moments of exchange and connection to suss out her themes. The scene in which the title of the film is explained is a lo-fi triumph, as a father imparts to a son what it is to work for one’s place in the world.
RED ISLAND, (aka L’ILE ROUGE), from left: Charlie Vauselle, Cathy Pham, 2023. © Film Movement / Courtesy Everett CollectionFilm Movement/Courtesy Everett Collection
Red Island
The great French director Robin Campillo yet again mines some of his own experience for this evocative picture of French colonialism in 1970s Madagascar. Largely through the eyes of a young boy, we see the fraught social dynamics of a French military base and the locals in its orbit, divides between race and class revealing themselves in troubling ways. But Campillo uses a light touch; his film floats along as if borne on the breeze of memory, lilting between vignettes that murmur with hidden meaning. A marriage falters, a forbidden romance feels the terrible strain of social pressure, a revolution foments among the occupied. And, in the film’s beguiling closing moments, Campillo gracefully reveals whose story this has been all along.
By MGM/Everett Collection.
Challengers
A slightly off-center romantic dramedy, Luca Guadagnino’s most commercial film to date nonetheless features much of his signature oddball polish. Turned on and turned up, Challengers throbs and thrums with lively energy, tracing the lives and loves of three tennis phenoms over the years as they circle and crash into one another. Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor, and Zendaya have boundless chemistry, deftly transitioning their characters from lusty adolescence to hardened (though perhaps no less lusty) adulthood. And the tennis is lots of fun, with Guadagnino showing as much flair in directing sports as he has in, say, directing demonic ballet or summer seduction.
By Amazon/ Everett Collection
The Idea of You
An Anne Hathaway movie about a middle-aged woman falling in love with a 20-something boy bander was probably always going to be a good time. But The Idea of You (based on a popular novel) turns a fun premise into something much more. Disarmingly poignant and lushly filmed, Michael Showalter’s film was a lovely springtime surprise. Hathaway is poised, confident, and decidedly grown up as a Los Angeles gallerist who falls hard, if a little reluctantly, for Nicholas Galitzine’s pop idol with a heart of gold. They’re a winning pair, selling a silly fantasy so successfully that it stops seeming silly at all.
By A24/ Everett Collection.
I Saw the TV Glow
Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s sad, searing memory piece is in some manner a horror film, in others a somber and devastating drama of identity. Full of metaphor and allusion, I Saw the TV Glow is on its face a reconsideration of Schoenbrun’s television-obsessed teenage years—those Buffy and Charmed and Are You Afraid of the Dark? days enjoyed by so many millennials. But in all that decidedly abstract pop-culture referencing, Schoenbrun unearths something else: a picture of the trans experience that is as urgent and empathetic as it is sorrowful. Though I Saw the TV Glow moves at a deliberate, occasionally glacial pace, one leaves the film rattled and electrified—so exciting is the assuredness of its artistry, so evocative are its suggestions. Schoenbrun is a major filmmaker to watch, and I Saw the TV Glow is a must-see.
By Walt Disney Co./Everett Collection.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Amidst the crumbling of so many once reliable film franchises, we can still count on the apes to awe and entertain. The fourth installment in the modern era of Apes, Kingdom can’t quite match the grandeur of Dawn. But it is still a rousing and wholly engrossing trip into a nearly posthuman future. Director Wes Ball creates a credible nu-topia in which some intelligent apes are happy to live bucolic lives, while others dream of domination and technological progress. Kingdom has lots of interesting things to say about how civilizations form and mutate, all while providing the expected adventure-movie thrills. With quality this consistent, Apes could continue on indefinitely.
By Warner Bros/Everett Collection.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
There was likely never going to be any improving on the glory of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. So director George Miller took a different tack, making a prequel that’s talkier and more far-ranging in time and place than its predecessor. While some of Fury Road’s relentless efficiency is missed, Furiosa does eventually hone itself into a riveting chase picture, with boggling stunts and a pleasingly blaring soundscape. The true highlight, though, may be a prosthetic-nosed Chris Hemsworth as the movie’s main baddie, Dementus. Preening and strutting and bellowing, Hemsworth is a marvel of complicated Shakespearean villainy, giving some classical rumble to match the roar of the engines.
La ChimeraCourtesy of Neon.
La Chimera
Another of Alice Rohrwacher’s folksy curios that are actually saying something rather deep about modern-day Italy, La Chimera concerns unlicensed excavators of antiquity, a band of rogues who dig around in the ancient soil to see what evidence of history they might find. Among them is a British man, Arthur (Josh O’Connor, speaking almost entirely in Italian), who is mourning a lost love. As La Chimera whispers and clatters along, the film contemplates what it means to go about the business of living when we are forever surrounded by reminders of the dead—people who came before us and made their own music, had their own romances, and left their own trail of debris before becoming it themselves.
Housekeeping for Beginners© Focus Features/Everett Collection.
Housekeeping for Beginners
Macedonian Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski’s third feature is a rambling, sometimes bruising found-family drama about a home shared by an interconnected crew of misfits in Skopje, North Macedonia’s capitol city. The great Anamaria Marinca plays a health care worker who finds herself taking on the role of den mother following a tragedy, working to formalize some of the bonds holding her motley clan together. Among other things, Housekeeping for Beginners is a sober look at the realities of Roma life in the Balkans, especially for those contending with the additional stigma of being queer in a bigoted society. Stolevski—one of the most exciting emerging directors on the world scene—manages a controlled chaos, keeping his film loose and lively while driving toward a stirring finish.
The End We Start From© Republic Pictures
The End We Start From
Killing Eve breakout Jodie Comer (who recently won a Tony for her staggering solo performance in Prima Facie) further proves her talent in this somber but never lugubrious survival drama from Mahalia Belo. As floodwaters overtake London, a new mother must head north in search of safety and sustainability while a nation credibly collapses around her. Finely observed and avoidant of melodrama, The End We Start From is a thoughtful, occasionally profound manifestation of a collective anxiety, the shared feeling that the fabric of the world is rapidly fraying to a breaking point. Belo steers through all that fear and calamity and finds something like hope on the other side.
The Promised LandCourtesy of Magnolia.
The Promised Land
Nikolaj Arcel’s robust, lushly mounted film is an old-fashioned epic, a settler Western unfolding on the barren heaths of Denmark rather than the American frontier. Mads Mikkelsen is sternly magnetic as Ludvig Kahlen, a longtime soldier seeking the favor of the Danish crown by cultivating a harsh landscape long thought to be an impossible wilderness. Through that struggle, Kahlen cobbles together a ragtag crew of waifs and cast-offs, and goes to bitter battle with a preening local lord played with perfect movie-villain sliminess by Simon Bennebjerg. Neither subtle nor overstated, The Promised Land reverently restores old forms to past luster, while paying stirring tribute to the resolve and fortitude of the simple potato.
How to Have SexFrom the Everett Collection.
How to Have Sex
A spring-break-esque holiday in Crete, booze-soaked and sun-baked, takes a grave turn in Molly Manning Walker’s striking debut feature. As a young woman who experiences a dire violation of consent, Mia McKenna-Bruce is a revelation, intricately mapping her character’s struggle to process, and name, what’s happened to her. Manning Walker stages a party gone to ruin with bracing realism, resisting sensationalism by leading with compassion instead of alarmism. True to its title, How to Have Sex is instructive in at least one crucial way: It yanks certain predatory behavior into the light, refusing to let it hide in supposed gray areas.
Dune: Part Two© Warner Bros/Everett Collection.
Dune: Part Two
Denis Villeneuve’s massive sequel mightily improves on its predecessor by infusing the franchise’s stunning aesthetics with actual plot and meaning. The empty beauty of the first film now keens with megalomaniac prophecy and religious fervor; the ministrations of a universe-spanning empire are brought terribly to bear on our revolutionary heroes and their worrisome messiah. Dune: Part Two functions equally well as either a bridge to further films or as the closer of a two-part franchise. It’s an all-too-rare IP blockbuster that is sturdy on its own feet while leaving open a door to further grandiose adventure.
One LifeFrom the Everett Collection.
One Life
A true-story tearjerker of the highest order, James Hawes’s rousing film is a memory piece about an elderly Nicholas Winton—a stockbroker who organized the rescue of nearly 700 Jewish children as the Nazis approached Czechoslovakia in 1938—recalling his boggling feat 50 years later. It’s a process movie too, as we watch a younger Winton use various bureaucratic and legal maneuvers to ensure safe-ish passage for each group of refugees. Anthony Hopkins continues his recent run of terrific work as the older Winton, crafting a portrait of heroism as a humble act of decency, of recognizing a mounting tragedy and simply doing what can be done to stop it. A worthy message for this or any era.
The Shadowless Tower© Strand Releasing/Everett Collection.
The Shadowless Tower
This quiet but sweeping drama, from director Zhang Lü, is a delicate romance, a sweet story of unexpected friendship, and a softly heartbreaking family reunion. It is also, in Zhang’s elegant framing, a winsome tribute to the old quarters of Beijing, their narrow streets and hole-in-the-wall eateries. Xin Baiqing, playing a rumpled, middle-aged food critic, is the soulful center of the film, while Huang Yao gamely plays the young photographer who coaxes him out of his stasis. Zhang’s modest narrative gradually builds toward a poignant conclusion, capturing the sound and sensation of time swiftly passing.
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