10 Best Movies of 2024 So Far (2024)

July 1, 2024

• ‘Challengers’

  

  Luca Guadagnino’s doubles match of tennis drama and tortured love-triangle romance gives its holy trinity of young actors the perfect showcase, as well as adding a serious amount of heat to a story in which backhands serve as foreplay. It confirms Zendaya is not just a star but a force of nature when given the chance to call the shots, serving as both muse and master to Mike Faist’s fast-tracked champion and Josh O’Connor’s charming burnout; proves that nothing is more of a turn-on than a game well played; and gifted the world with the single most hom*oerotic churro in film history. Read the full review.

• ‘La Chimera’

  

  Speaking of Josh O’Connor: The British actor has had one hell of a 2024, thanks to both Challengers and this incredible, near-mystical drama from Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro), about a British archeological scholar who occasionally moonlights as a tomb raider. He’s got a sixth sense for finding graves filled with ancient — and lucrative — artifacts, which makes a return to his old stomping grounds a boon for his old partners in crime. It’s not greed but grief, however, that drives this thief, and the way that O’Connor turns his throwback, seedy ’70s anti-hero into a man of constant sorrow is revelatory. An absolutely glorious, gutting story about stealing from the past while still being cursed to never, ever bring it back. Read the full review.

• ‘Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World’

  

  In which the end comes not with a bang, but with a TikTok post featuring a fake incel bragging about his prolific sex life. Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s biting satire captures our current the-center-cannot-hold moment better than just about any other film of the past few years; its title may be a mouthful, but the more accurate name Apocalypse Now was, regrettably, already spoken for. Following Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a Bucharest-based production assistant frantically driving from one meaningless task to the next, this chaotic comedy contrasts this gig-economy worker’s wage-slavery with life during the authoritarian Ceaușescu regime and comes to the conclusion that only the dates on the calendar have changed. Angela social-media rants via her alter ego — a toxic-male caricature known as Bobita — couldn’t be more crudely hilarious. The movie’s climax, in which we see a dead man’s family get gaslit and reality gets hijacked, couldn’t feel more unsettling. Read the full review.

• ‘Dune: Part 2’

  

  Denis Villeneuve makes good — very good — on the promise of his 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s doorstopper of a sci-fi novel, picking up where he left off (roughly past the book’s halfway point) and digging into the themes of power, morality, revolution and what happens when a reluctant messiah embraces his destiny not wisely but too well. You get a tougher Timothée Chalamet, a truly psychotic Austin Butler, a moody Florence Pugh and twice as many sandworms. More importantly, you get the chance to see Villeneuve expand on the world he built off of Herbert’s prose and do justice to the scope and scale and sheer weirdness of a stoner-lit touchstone without, pun intended, sanding away its edges. It’s unapologetically geeky, and twice as unapologetically cinematic. Read the full review.

• ‘How to Have Sex’

  

  A coming-of-age movie that initially smells like a recognizable teen spirit (i.e. a cross between Axe body spray, spillage from rail-liquor shots, and pheromones) before taking an extremely dark turn, British writer-director Molly Walker’s debut rides shotgun as a young woman named Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) plays girls-gone-wild with her friends in the coastal Greek town of Malia. She has her eye on a fellow spring breaker next door, a friendly dude-bro nicknamed “Badger” (Shaun Thomas). The morning after a big night, however, no one knows where she is. And when she eventually returns to her friends, we get a glimpse of how a bad decision suddenly casts a dark shadow over this whole sunny excursion. That Walker knows how to handle such things without being sensationalistic, as well as tenderly sketching the tension and sensitivity that characterize female friendships at that age, is what keeps the film from being a boozy, sunburnt tragedy. McKenna-Bruce, however, is what makes Sex feel like you’re watching an uncomfortably personal, near-poetic home movie of a vacation turning into a horror story. Read the full review.

• ‘Janet Planet’

  

  Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker steps behind the camera and delivers the last word on mother-daughter relationships, crafting a dual character study of a hippie-ish New England mom (Julianne Nicholson) and her 11-year-old kid (newcomer Zoe Ziegler) as they spend a summer navigating a particularly fraught push-pull dynamic. Like her stage work, Baker’s directorial debut is filled with long silences, empty spaces and things left unsaid; it’s also a testament to the power of leaving things unresolved, as a preadolescent tries to make sense of an adult world that, frankly, seems as foreign to her grasping, seeking parent as it does to her. A beautiful minor masterpiece. Read the full review.

• ‘Perfect Days’

  

  Legendary Japanese actor Kōji Yakusho gives a career-best performance as Hirayama, a middle-aged man who cleans public toilets for a living. He’s the kind of invisible civil servant who goes about their business in big cities throughout the world with both professionalism and anonymity, yet Yakusho and filmmaker Wim Wenders gives us an extended peek into this everyman’s inner life — and the result is a gentle, affectionate portrait of someone who has truly embraced a carpe diem mentality. For so much of Perfect Days‘ running time, the star doesn’t seem to be “acting.” He laughs, he momentarily tears up, he plays a beer-buzzed game of tag. And then Yakusho hits you with the sucker punch, courtesy of a close-up that leaves you reeling. Read the full review.

• ‘Robot Dreams’

  

  Do androids dream of electric sheep? A better question: What if their R.E.M. cycles were filled with the same thoughts of love and loneliness and hopes and fears as the rest of us? Based on Sarah Varon’s 2007 graphic novel, Pablo Berger’s animated buddy dramedy treats that idea as a given, pairing an anthropomorphic dog and his some-assembly-required robot best friend as they tool around a cartoon New York City. Then an incident causes these two inseparable pals to be separated, time passes, and the world keeps turning. The question is not what happens to Robot and Dog in the interim before the last day of one summer and the start of another, nor what dreams may come before then — though the various flights of slumbering fancy that the movie does show run an impressive gamut from Grimm fairy-tale nightmares to Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. It’s what will occur when these two buddies encounter each other again. A hint: Have several boxes of tissue handy. And know that you will never, ever hear Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” the same way again. Read the full review.

• ‘The Taste of Things’

  

  Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) is a renowned French gourmand who spends his days studying the science of food when he’s not indulging in long, luxurious lunches with a group of like-minded obsessives. Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) is his in-house cook of 20 years. They have spent years bonding over the mutual love of the culinary arts as the 19th century comes to a close, knowing that tragedy will inevitably be knocking on their door soon. French-Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung gives us an epic valentine to the power of the kitchen, letting viewers luxuriate in long, mouth-watering sequences of meals being meticulously prepared that he films like love scenes. Yet to merely experience this sensual movie as five-star food p*rn is to miss the way that the writer-director and his dynamic duo equate the intimacy of cooking with culture, love, the world around us. It’s a movie that recognizes how life is short but also sweet — and that it’s such a pleasure to have shared and tasted what it has to offer at all. Read the full review.

• ‘Tótem’

  

  Coming-of-age movies so often run the gamut from cloyingly sentimental to cringeworthy — Mexican filmmaker Lila Avilés takes the road less traveled with this tale of a girl (Naíma Sentíes) saying goodbye to her terminally ill father, leaning into the way her environment and her family nurture her, and that makes all the difference. This is a movie about death that brims with life, a gentle drama that somehow never collapses under its own weight or lets sorrow fully take the wheel. It ends with a birthday party that you know will be the celebrant’s last, as seen through a child’s eyes yet handled with a sensitivity that suggests an artist with a genuinely humanistic sensibility. Read the full review.