For the first half of 2024, the main talking point around the movies was that no one was going to see them. Why weren’t audiences flocking to see Ryan Gosling drive stunt cars and flirt with Emily Blunt?
Why did Furiosa flop when the last Mad Max film was such a hit? It was especially perplexing given that last year, the worldwide box office had seemed to finally rebound from the post-pandemic doldrums.
Studio fortunes are improving, however, on the backs of some major kids movies and the monster success of Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine.
You’ll notice some of these movies came out in the US at the back end of 2023, but we’re basing this list on UK release dates to include the best worldwide releases from between January and December. And there is plenty more coming, so keep this one bookmarked.
Best new movies of 2024
1. The Zone of Interest
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.
2. Poor Things
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.
3. Dune: Part Two
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.
4. All Of Us Strangers
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.
5. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
No movies are providing moviegoers with more bang for their buck than George Miller’s Mad Max franchise, and Fury Road and now Furiosa, the most mythologically rich blockbusters since Lord of the Rings, come with an almost deranged desire to shock and awe. Unlike the arrow-sleek Fury Road, Furiosa, a generation-spanning origin story with Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy stepping into Charlize Theron’s boots, gets weighed down by extra narrative baggage. But with Chris Hemsworth a joy as the scheming, oratorical Dementus, and one War Rig chase as mind blowing as anything in its predecessor, it’s still an essential watch. No one is doing it quite like the Aussie doctor.
6. About Dry Grasses
This latest film from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Winter Sleep) once again confirms him as one of the most serious and consistent filmmakers at work today. It’s a demanding study of an unpleasant male teacher at work – unhappily – in the rural wilds of Túrkiye. It comes with ravishing photography, intense conversations, moral quandaries and some unexpected playfulness – all deeply rewarding to chew over.
7.Green Border
At a time when refugees are vilified by populists, Agnieszka Holland delivers the perfect rebuttal to that nasty, inhumane mode of thinking. Green Border is a tough watch as it follows a small band of Syrians, Africans and Afghans shunted back and forth between Belarus and Poland, human chess pieces in European politics who are left to suffer in the freezing forests of Eastern Europe. But there’s hope here, too: in the younger Europeans who reject the barbarity of their elders, and in the richly-drawn migrants themselves, some of whom are played by actual refugees. It’s a bleak but brilliant piece of humanist filmmaking.
8 Longlegs
The best supernatural chiller since Hereditary, this serial-killer procedural arrives with more buzz than a fly-blown John Doe. It’s an unenviable burden to carry, and plenty of gorehounds will grumble that it’s not scary enough, especially with US distributors Neon playing the ‘it’s utterly terrifying’ card pretty hard in its breakout viral campaign. But see it unencumbered from heavy expectations and immerse yourself in a lingering, hauntingly blank-hearted horror film from Oz ‘son of Anthony’ Perkins and producer-star Nicolas Cage. Fans of It Follows and The Guest have been saying it for yonks, but her Clarice Starling-like FBI agent is yet more proof that Maika Monroe is a star.
9. Hit Man
It’s frustrating that Richard Linklater’s stupidly entertaining comedy-thriller was deprived of a full-scale cinema release, because it’s absolutely what Friday nights at the cinema are all about. With the Cheshire cat grin of a younger Tom Cruise, Anyone But You star Glen Powell plays a sad-sack New Orleans professor who discovers a gift for impersonating assassins for the police. Then he meets Adria Arjona’s abused wife and would-be murderess and his moral code gets scrambled in all sorts of mind-bending ways. Still, it’ll be on Netflix, if you did miss it.
10. The Taste of Things
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.
11. Io Capitano
Photograph: Greta De Lazzaris /Altitude
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.
12. La Chimera
Few filmmakers find space for the earthy and the fantastical with the assurance of Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro). The Italian auteur delivers another mythically-tinged picaresque, lit up this time by Josh O’Connor as a dodgy but charming British archeologist – a Graham Greene character in a dirt-stained suit – on the hunt for Etruscan treasures with a band of colourful grave robbers. Shot through with surrealist beauty and grubby opportunism, La Chimera is a jalopy ride through rural 1980s Lazio, with narrative bumps and hairpins to lend a sense of the unexpected, and views to match.
13. Challengers
The sexiest thing to happen to tennis since Björn Borg launched his range of skimpy undies, Luca Guadagnino’s homoerotically-charged love triangle is like Jules and Jim sponsored by Head. Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor are great as the jaded champion and scrappy coulda-been facing off in a US Open warm-up event, but Zendaya steals the show as the pointy bit of the triangle: an injury-hit ex-prodigy whose ambitions are poured into a husband (Faist) incapable of satisfying them. And Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s fierce, electro score might be their best work since The Social Network.
14. I Saw the TV Glow
‘If David Lynch grew up obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ seems a simplistic description, but it’s about as close as an elevator pitch will get you to grasping the second feature from emerging horror dynamo Jane Schoenbrun (2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair). Storywise, it focuses on two lonely teens who bond over a television show that may or may not actually exist, but it’s really a mood piece: heavy on atmosphere and thick with anxiety, with a distinctive Day-Glo visual palette. According to Schoenbrun, it’s also an allegory for the trans experience, and though gender dysphoria is never explicitly mentioned, the sense of living a life that’s not your own comes through clearly. Nightmarish and nakedly emotional, it has one of the year’s best endings too.
15. Alien Romulus
Count this Alien resurrection as one of the year’s nicest surprises – and by ‘nice’, obviously we mean sadistic, gross and jaw-droppingly violent. Horror master Fede Álvarez presides over a conveyor belt of juicy, acid-dripping shocks as Priscilla star Cailee Spaeny leads a band of young mining colony workers onto a space station that’s about to become xenomorph central. It’s a hugely satisfying horror movie, while simultaneously suggesting that we’ve reached the outer limits of the franchise’s lore. The Alien: Covenant and Prometheus-riffing third act is the weakest stretch.
16. The Inside Out 2
Is Pixar back? No one had this nine-years-in-the-making sequel down as the film to save the multiplex summer. But with first week receipts closing in on $500 million, Inside Out 2 feels big, both for cinemas and for the cultural clout of a once-great animation house struggling with its place in the Disney hierarchy. If it’s not quite up there with the first film – firmly established in – there’s loads to love in its expansion of Riley’s mind. Maya Hawke is fab as the voice of the jittery but well-meaning Anxiety, and Pouchy has just surpassed Forky, Spanish Buzz and Ken as Pixar’s most inspired piece of comic relief.
17. The Iron Claw
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.
18. The Holdovers
Photograph: Universal Pictures
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.
19. Evil Does Not Exist
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.
20. Janet Planet
Playwright Annie Baker writes and directs a delightful account of a quirky 11-year-old hanging out with her divorced mother (Julianne Nicholson) in rural Massachusetts in the ’90s. Anchored by a wonderful performance from child actor Zoe Ziegler, it’s a witty, atmospheric slow burner with chapters dedicated to distinctive characters – played by actors including Sophie Okonedo and Will Patton. The child’s-eye perspective invites a deeply personal, nostalgic response.
