The movie year 2024 got a jolt of life this past month with the arrivals of rousing franchise fare from “Inside Out 2” to “A Quiet Place: Day One.” But there’s also much to celebrate on the front of original releases, from the Neon-record-breaking “Longlegs” over the July 12 weekend to, earlier in the year, more originals like “Civil War” banking for A24. Magnolia Pictures’ “Thelma,” meanwhile, also defied the odds to become a rare box office breakout from Sundance.
And while none of these movies are on our list of the best films of 2024 so far — which we’ve pooled below from our highest-praising reviews from the past six months — but they all point toward a movie-going culture that’s healthier than some pictures paint.
The below list of 20 films will absolutely evolve as the year moves forward, and as the 2024 fall festivals are around the bend, bringing a fresh crop of brand-new movies. Some of our favorites this year came from last year’s fall festivals, finally making their way to theaters in recent months, from “The Beast” to “Janet Planet.” Others, like “Challengers,” were waylaid by the strikes of which the industry continues to feel the effects.
Below, IndieWire picks the 20 best films of 2024 (so far). And be sure to check out IndieWire’s list of the best TV shows of 2024 so far, too.
“Compelling evidence that every major arthouse director should be required to make their own ‘Cloud Atlas’ before they die, Bertrand Bonello’s sweeping, romantic, and ravishingly strange ‘The Beast’ finds the French director broadening — and in some cases challenging — the core obsessions of his previous films into a sci-fi epic about the fear of falling in love.”
“A sweet and shimmeringly beautiful film about how life can flow and then freeze and then thaw into something entirely new if you let it, Anthony Chen’s ‘The Breaking Ice’ finds hope in the most frigid of places. In this case, that place is the small Chinese border city of Yanji during the depths of its endless winter, when people’s breath is as thick as the gray fumes that spew out of the factory smokestacks, and the snowy peak of Changbai Mountain looks closer to heaven than it does to Pyongyang. More than half a million people live there (many of them ethnic Koreans), but few of them seem to think of it as home. It’s as if they got stuck there on their way to somewhere else, and — in the wake of a pandemic that restricted travel and imperiled the economy — are still waiting to be defrosted. Still waiting for the warmth they need to become liquid again.”
“If, as Blanche Dubois once said, ‘The opposite of death is desire,’ then Luca Guadagnino will live forever, and his latest film — a transcendently sweaty tennis love triangle so turned on by the heat of competition that its sex scenes feel like foreplay and its rallies feel like porn — is possibly the most unbridled portrait of resurrection since ‘The Passion of the Christ.’
“It’s definitely the horniest story ever set within the purgatorial concrete nothing of New Rochelle, NY, which is where this movie’s three main characters all happen to cross paths during the final match of a dingy U.S. Open qualifier that’s being sponsored by a local tire store. They’ve been fucking each other on and off the court for more than a decade by the time ‘Challengers’ unleashes its first serve, and yet, despite winning on every level of their chosen sport, these long-limbed athletes have lost their lust for life at some point along the way. At this point, their lust for each other might be the only force on Earth powerful enough to get their heads back in the game.”
“Animation has the power to make even the simplest emotions feel as infinite and expressive as our most sacred memories, which — despite the edifying nuance and eye-popping flair of recent films such as ‘Encanto’ and ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ — can make it frustrating that American studios have largely been trending toward overcomplicated plots and realistic design. Sébastien Laudenbach and Chiara Malta’s extremely French ‘Chicken for Linda’ is the clearest possible reminder of what we’ve been missing. It’s about an eight-year-old girl named Linda who wants to eat chicken for dinner. Delightful mayhem ensues.”
“It takes flair to concoct visual-gag-after-visual-gag within episodic riffs on the raw deals suffered by the gig-economy-classes in modern day Bucharest. Radu Jude blends absurdist humor with keen social integrity, like a sharper Romanian riposte to Ruben Östlund, as the trials of a dangerously overworked production assistant named Ange (Ilinca Manolache, sensational) builds to a 40-minute final shot in which tragicomedy is heaped upon tragicomedy to unbearably brilliant effect.”
“‘Evil Does Not Exist,’ the title of the latest film from ‘Drive My Car’ director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, is a bold statement to make in the year 2023 [the year the film premiered at Venice]. As it turns out in this eerie and elusive ecological tone poem about man, nature, and man’s nature, the statement is not necessarily something the Japanese filmmaker believes.
“This made-in-secret and gently lilting film set in a bucolic village on the outskirts of Tokyo seems like a call for compassion on the surface — it centers on how the village’s inhabitants tangle with a corporation trying to set up a glamping site in their forest, only for the two opposing sides to eventually find common ground. But that entente proves a foil for a much darker twist Hamaguchi pulls in the film’s last act.”
“In our cancel-happy times, there’s hardly room for an empathy-for-all approach to identity-based violence and abuse. Enter Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s ‘Femme,’ a bruiser of a British queer revenge thriller that plunges straight into the gray areas that can form between attacker and victim.
“Retrofitting the pages of ‘90s erotic suspense films to a 2023 sensibility, ‘Femme’ stars Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (breakout of ‘Culprits’) as a Black drag queen who, after being assaulted by a white, closeted street thug played by George MacKay, reaps revenge by seducing his attacker, who later doesn’t recognize him out of drag. But in the process, fraught tenderness and attraction form between Jules (Stewart-Jarrett) and Preston (MacKay), making Jules’ calculated act of vengeance — and the film itself — that much more complicated.”
“What to expect when you’re expecting … the Antichrist? Filmmaker Arkasha Stevenson delivers her gleefully gruesome answer to that increasingly popular question in 20th Century’s terrifying and triumphant ‘The First Omen.’ It’s a nominally named soft franchise reboot and the vastly superior (if accidental) answer to Neon’s ‘Immaculate’ with Sydney Sweeney.
“Yes, both horror films explore what happens when a child of Christ is involuntarily forced to carry a demon baby to term. And yes, both movies have some merit; trite but true, Damien just doesn’t have that ‘Cassie from “Euphoria”‘ pull. But only Stevenson’s spin on ‘The Omen’ can tie its borderline NC-17 terror to a multi-decade genre legacy suddenly feasting on noticeably improved visual artistry and a narratively satisfying revamp of stale IP.”
“Inveterate madman George Miller has followed the most spectacular action movie of the 21st century not with a sequel that continues where ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ left off (though he hopes to make one of those someday), but rather with a prequel that paves the way to where it began. By the same token, it also stands to reason that Miller hasn’t tried to outdo the orgiastic mayhem that brought his Ozploitation franchise screaming into the 21st century all shiny and chrome — the guy might be insane, but he isn’t stupid.
“Nor is he willing to settle for diminishing returns. Rather than reaching for — and failing to clear — the impossibly high bar that he set for himself, Miller has chosen to do something even crazier and more rewarding: He’s created a symphonic, five-part, decades-spanning revenge saga so immense and self-possessed that it refuses to be seen as the mere extension of another movie, even though it manages to deepen the impact of ‘Fury Road’ at every turn.”
“Sinister and liberating in equal measure (and often at the same time), Jane Schoenbrun’s ultra-lo-fi ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’ leveraged the inherent loneliness of webcams and the performative danger of online creepypasta into a haunting portrait of the potentially dysphoric relationship between screens and identity in the internet age. The kind of sui generis shot in the dark that feels like it could only have been made by someone who wasn’t sure if anyone would see it, Schoenbrun’s first movie is one of the rare coming-of-age films that manages to embody the full dread and possibility of self-recognition, and for that reason it almost immediately resonated with an audience of people — trans people in particular — who’d been waiting for something like ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’ since before they had the language to know how much they needed it.”
“An intimate three-hour epic of deliberate pacing, Vietnamese writer-director Thien An Pham’s debut feature, ‘Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,’ is a spellbinding tale of the soul’s unfathomable desire for the other-worldly, that does itself border on transcendental in its filmmaking and gradual blurring of apparent truth and suggested fantasy.
“The film premiered in the Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight section, where the filmmaker was previously recipient of the Illy Prize in 2019 for the short ‘Stay Awake, Be Ready,’ in which a roadside accident at a street corner interrupted a conversation between three friends having a meal. That short seems loosely remade for the new feature’s opening scene, which expands the idea to explore a man’s attempted overcoming of a deeply unsatisfied life, taking him from urban Saigon to the hinterland of Vietnam, out of both familial necessity and a quest to make sense of where and how to proceed with his life going forward.”
“In the opening moments of ‘Janet Planet,’ Annie Baker‘s understated miracle of a directorial debut, a young girl runs across a darkened field into a seemingly abandoned structure. She picks up the phone in the dimly lit wooden room and makes a shocking claim: She’s going to kill herself.
“It’s a disorienting statement that makes the viewer immediately question what exactly this film is or may become. It also turns out to be a wry joke that serves as an introduction to Lacy (newcomer Zoe Ziegler), the wonderfully peculiar preteen whose perspective is the movie’s engine.”
“Nothing in this sick, sad world is simpler or more complicated than sex, a principle that helps to explain why the ever-provocative Catherine Breillat — whose films so often consecrate female desire by rendering it violently indefinable — was drawn to remake a 2019 Danish movie about a middle-aged lawyer who dedicates her life to defending young rape victims, only to begin a torrid affair with her own 17-year-old stepson.
“May el-Toukhy’s ‘Queen of Hearts’ spun that stark hypocrisy into a melodrama ridden with shame and secret darkness. Breillat’s ‘Last Summer’ is much lighter in every way, and all the more revealing as a result; it leverages the same premise into a rich exploration of the inadequate judgment such a premise exists to invite.
“American director Ben Mullinkosson started filming ‘The Last Year of Darkness’ to document the lives of his friends, a ragtag assortment of DJs, ravers, drag performers and skaters who all found themselves and each other in the pulsating world of Funky Town, a queer underground club hidden away in Chengdu. Shot across five years and distilled from 600 hours of footage, Mullinkosson’s second feature intimately captures the euphoric joy of China’s alternative club scene, a place where outsiders, and queer people especially, can be who they want to be. And yet the end result is so much more than just a mere rave documentary.”
It’s [Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian’s] crackling chemistry — which Glass funnels into a series of genuinely hot sex scenes that more than prove the necessity for such sequences in films that hinge on actual human romantic relationships — that drives ‘Love Lies Bleeding,’ an alternately alluring and excruciating crime thriller that also smacks of body horror and midnight movie thrills. Glass, who previously earned scads of instant fans with her ‘Saint Maud,’ again tackles the human body as a vessel for pain, pleasure, and so much more, though the brutally blunt imagery that comes to dominate the film loses its power over time.”
“With Ti West’s visceral and moody ‘MaXXXine,’ that ultra-modern trend [of brat-ification] has been crystallized as a sharp yet gawdy deconstruction of so-called female empowerment — arriving in theaters just in time for your cute little summer. A24’s reigning scream queen Mia Goth makes her fashionable and, yes, distinctly bratty return as Maxine Minx in this gruesome and vital last chapter for the ‘X’ trilogy. If nothing else, the dazzling finale feels like a hyperviolent ‘80s period piece tailor-made For the Girls. It delivers some of the series’ most extreme kills as well as its best uses of glittery costumes, bloody testicles, and feminist subversion for a whirlwind joy ride that doubles as a societal lambasting.”
“If you went to Cinema São Luiz today, instead of finding the most celebrated theater in Recife (the capital of Brazil’s state of Pernambuco), you would find closed doors and a now-iconic sign that reads, ‘We’ll see each other again soon.’ Because of the pandemic and a seemingly endless renovation job on the government’s part, this hallowed ground has been sealed for all but three months since March 2020.
For locals such as myself, that’s partly why seeing it through the lens of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s incredibly personal new documentary ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ feels so poignant. Through a mix of archival footage and new recordings, ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ sees its director — whose filmography is already rich with deep, complex portraits of his hometown, such as ‘Neighboring Sounds’ and ‘Aquarius‘ — revisiting the places that made him. Recife’s movie theaters are chief among them.”
“‘Solo‘ isn’t so much about belonging as it is the desperate need to belong, and it’s this pain that [drag queen] Simon (Théodore Pellerin) is forced to work through when his life twists into something happier (at first) with the arrival of a new drag colleague named Olivier (Félix Maritaud). But this isn’t a typical coming-of-age story or a typically romantic queer movie, either. For her third feature, Canadian writer/director Sophie Dupuis taps into something more fluid, much like queerness itself, that interweaves drag as artistry with the kind of toxic relationship dynamics that Fran Rogowksi brought to life so vividly last year in Ira Sachs’ ‘Passages.’ And of course, what would any discussion of queer French-Canadian cinema in particular be without mention of Xavier Dolan, whose fixation on unhealthy mother/son dynamics is also echoed here, too.”
“Sometimes Fran pictures herself lying in a quiet forest, dead. Sometimes, Fran imagines herself being lifted, probably by the neck, by a massive crane, dying. Sometimes, there’s a big snake or a desolate beach. Sometimes, yes, Fran thinks about dying. And that’s OK because Rachel Lambert’s whimsical ‘Sometimes I Think About Dying‘ and the complicated woman at its center also think about other things, good things. Like, well, not dying. Maybe even, perhaps, living. For a film about the pull of death, there sure is a lot of life in this low-key charmer.”
“The summer of 2020 shouldn’t project beautiful memories onto the brain maps of those who endured it, but Theda Hammel’s anxiety-addled screwball feature debut ‘Stress Positions,’ set around that COVID Fourth of July in New York, asks you to relive the scary days of sheltering in place, banging pots and pans in solidarity with health care workers, and social distancing whenever it was convenient or made you look like you stood for something.”
