The 26 Best Movies of 2024 (So Far) (2024)

Why isn’t anyone going to the movies? That’s the big question coming out of Hollywood right now, following a dismal May and the worst adjusted Memorial Day weekend at the box office in nearly three decades. The most disappointing new release was George Miller’s latest installment in the Mad Max franchise, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The film debuted with a $32 million opening weekend, far below projections (and what it needs to recoup its $168 million budget). What’s unnerving isn’t that an expected blockbuster is underperforming but rather that an expected blockbuster as good—and downright entertaining—as Furiosa fell short. The film is a blast, it’s built from revered IP, and it sports two big stars (Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth). So what gives?

Frankly, I don’t have an answer. What I do know is, box office be damned, 2024 is shaping up to be a pretty solid year for new releases. In addition to Furiosa, we got an ideal movie to watch with the whole family (Hit Man), a thrillingly scrappy teen road journey (Gasoline Rainbow), and a quietly staggering meditation on humanity’s relationship to the natural world (Evil Does Not Exist). Here are the best movies of the year so far.

If you go into Hit Man expecting a movie about a ruthless hired gun, you’ll be sorely disappointed—though perhaps not as disappointed as one of the poor saps who tried to hire a hit man and instead met an undercover agent posing as one. In his adaptation of Skip Hollandsworth’s 2001 Texas Monthly story about a college professor named Gary Johnson who moonlighted as a fake hit man, Richard Linklater mixes screwball comedy with a meditation on how people change. There may not be much in the way of slick kills, but there is a lot of breezy fun.

With a less nuanced and contemplative director, a title like Evil Does Not Exist might have come off as a disastrously didactic, Oscar-baiting screed on the virtue inside all of us. But Ryusuke Hamaguchi is more interested in our inherent contradictions. The movie is set in a small, rural Japanese village, where residents live in relative harmony with nature. When a cynical glamping company comes to town, that balance is threatened. The company’s arrival leads to one of the great scenes of the year—a public meeting in which townspeople interrogate its representatives—as well as a hauntingly confounding ending.

It’s impossible not to think of Mad Max: Fury Road while watching that film’s new prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. But if you put aside all the hype, what you’re left with is one of the very best big-budget action movies since…well, Fury Road. George Miller’s latest installment in the Mad Max franchise is a high-octane, pedal-to-the-metal dystopian thrill ride in its own right, featuring a couple unbelievable set pieces, a barrage of dizzying cuts, and one scene-stealing schnoz.

Bertrand Bonello’s latest was loosely inspired by Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle. But while the author, were he alive today, might recognize some similar themes (loneliness, fear, self-destructive fatalism), The Beast takes the source material in directions James never could’ve anticipated. The film intertwines three separate narratives, in which star-crossed souls (played wonderfully by Léa Seydoux and George MacKay) meet in various time periods: 1910, 2014, and 2044. Whereas the first is a fairly Jamesian Parisian costume drama, the latter two timelines find Bonello exploring thoroughly modern fears: incels and artificial intelligence. Altogether, The Beast is as uneven and indulgent as it is audacious, full of experiments in genre and laced with wry, sometimes melodramatic humor. Since seeing it at last year’s New York Film Festival, I’ve debated whether it’s amazing or horrible, but it’s undoubtedly memorable.

I loved Jane Schoenbrun’s microbudget debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. But I Saw the TV Glow is one of the greatest freshman-to-sophom*ore level-ups I can remember—it’s an example of what promising talents can do when you give them freedom and resources. The film, featuring a shy, TV-obsessed teenager named Owen (Justice Smith), is a coming-of-age story about the nightmarish consequences of personal repression. As brutal as it can be, I also found it incredibly inspiring. By portraying the dire costs of playing it safe, Schoenbrun convincingly makes the case that a conservative approach to life isn’t safe at all.

Vera Drew’s satirical DIY spin on superherodom’s most exhausted characters is so visually and referentially chaotic—mixing forms, switching names, and gleefully messing with the powers that be—that it can be easy to overlook what an affectingly personal work it is. At the heart of this future-set, no-rules, community-woven collage is Drew’s story of gender transition and comedy evolution. It takes issue with improv’s first rule of “Yes, and…” and proves there’s a lot of gold to be mined from “No, but…”

I had some issues with this Neo Sora–directed concert film—it felt like it ended several times before it actually did, and though it’s gorgeous aesthetically, the crisp black-and-white cinematography calls to mind an Apple commercial. Ultimately, these are minor quibbles. The bottom line here is that Sora brings the viewer into intimate contact with Ryuichi Sakamoto as he performs a profoundly touching swan song.

Here, from Belgian director Bas Devos, follows Stefan (Stefan Gota), a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels, as he finishes a job and prepares to move back home. In his final days away, he makes a soup out of the remaining food in his fridge and forms a bond with Shuxiu (Liyo Gong), a botanist who works part-time in her aunt’s restaurant. The film is a beautiful, serene meditation on connection and the slow process of change—and an extremely justified celebration of soup.

In Free Time, Ryan Martin Brown subverts your traditional movie structure by giving his hero what he wants right off the bat. During a meeting with his supervisor, Drew (played by Colin Burgess) surprises himself by quitting his job in an effort to savor what’s left of his youth. But lacking direction—and fellow unemployed friends—he is quickly burdened by his newfound freedom. This is a comedy (and a very funny one at that), but if you’re among those who can relate, its discomfort might just verge on horror.

If you trail anyone with a camera for long enough, you’ll probably observe some interesting things. That’s true of the young French painter Apolonia Sokol, whom Danish doc maker Lea Glob spent thirteen years filming. Through Glob’s lens, we see Sokol grow as an artist and as a woman, build community, navigate the art world, and process loss. Sokol’s story provides plenty to chew on—about family, art making, and modern womanhood. And it helps that she’s an extraordinarily captivating screen presence.

Totem, from The Chambermaid director Lila Avilés, is such an evocative expression of the extraordinarily specific and intense stew of feelings associated with celebrating an end. The film is largely told from the perspective of Sol (Naíma Sentíes), a seven-year-old girl who is spending the day at her grandfather’s house, where the family is getting ready to hold a surprise party for her sick father. The buildup to the party is slow—giving Avilés the chance to paint subtly shaded portraits of the various family members—and results in a powerful climax.