The Best Movies of 2024 (So Far)

Conclave 

Edward Berger’s Conclave is adapted, quite faithfully, from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, and it combines the pulp velocity of a great airport read with the gravitas of high drama. It follows the ritualistic backstabbing that goes on during the election of a new pope as a group of men steeped in tradition try diligently to shut out the modern world — even though that world is still there, outside the windows of the Vatican, constantly felt in everything they do. The film features a perfect role for Ralph Fiennes as the dean of the College of Cardinals, a deeply conflicted man who admits that he values doubt and abhors certainty, even as he becomes more obsessed with controlling the outcome of the election. Amid the stately ceremony, Berger finds ways to insert gradually escalating tumult and cattiness. The priests’ fragile isolation isn’t just a psychological element. We sense throughout that the outside world is undergoing turmoil, of which these men are mostly unaware — though we suspect they soon will be, both metaphorically and physically. Berger expertly milks that anticipation, then nails several artfully heated and lively climaxes. —Bilge Ebiri

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Conclave and Louis Peitzman’s close look at the twist ending. 

Dahomey

Mati Diop’s second feature is a documentary about the repatriation of 26 royal artifacts from France to Benin, though that description doesn’t do her urgent, mysterious film justice. In just 68 minutes, it conjures up a dreamlike inner monologue for the looted treasures, depicts their journey across the ocean to be displayed and celebrated in Cotonou, and drops into a heated debate among university students about the significance of the objects. Dahomey weaves together considerations of history, colonialism, and reparations, all while giving due to the enigmatic presence of artworks restored to a homeland that, however changed, remains where they belong. —Alison Willmore

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Dahomey and Jasmine Vojdani’s interview with director Mati Diop. 

Anora 

Sean Baker’s Anora is a movie about the way people look at one another, though it may not seem that way on the surface. It follows an eventful few weeks in the life of a stripper who marries the young son of a zillionaire Russian oligarch, and it has an infectious, freewheeling energy that feels like a high-concept comedy that has gone wonderfully off the rails. It could be 21st-century screwball, but it’s also a film about exploitation and labor. Baker spends an unusual amount of time showing us the workings of the club where our hero, Ani (Mikey Madison), dances; there’s a lived-in authenticity to the setting that clearly comes from extensive research. We see the ways that these women — always exceedingly polite and accommodating, able to put their clients at ease — interact with one another, their moments of quiet solidarity as well as their occasional rivalries. When the wild, charismatic, and totally unreliable young billionaire scion Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) starts spending an insane amount of time and money on Ani, Baker charges through these scenes in an almost hallucinatory frenzy, sweeping us along the way that Ani herself has been swept along. But the truth is that Ani has more in common with the human machinery around Ivan. We spend much of Anora with an ever-growing hole in the pit of our stomachs, waiting for the inevitable. And while the men who come to put an end to this marriage fit the stereotype of the murderous goons we know and love and fear from many genre movies, Baker, a humanist at heart, understands that they too are workers just trying to get through their day and not get fired. That’s when the magic of Anora truly kicks in, as things spin out of control and the picture expands in unorthodox ways. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Anora, Ebiri’s interview with star Mark Eydelshteyn, Rachel Handler’s interview with the supporting cast, Madeline Leung Coleman’s close read of filmmaker Sean Baker’s politics, and A.A. Dowd on the film’s ending. 

Rumours

With Rumours, the legendary Canadian director Guy Maddin, working with his regular collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson, has made what might be his funniest film to date. But, as always with Maddin, the humor is somewhat rarefied. Rumours follows the leaders of the G7 as they get lost in a German forest and are beset by mysterious ancient figures while also being consumed by their own strange passions. The humor does require some vague familiarity with the way these public international get-togethers — be it the G7 summit, the NATO summit, or assorted U.N. gatherings — never result in anything resembling real actions or solutions, instead issuing countless weak-willed joint statements and working papers and other forms of diplo-blather. And while the danger of movies based on conceptual wit is that they will lose steam as things proceed and the filmmakers run out of ideas, Maddin and the Johnsons thankfully develop their story — goofy and absurd though it may be — so that these constant digs at our ineffectual leaders do coalesce into something meaningful and alarming. But still hilarious: Just because we’re choking on our laughter doesn’t mean we’re not still laughing. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Rumours.

The Outrun

Saoirse Ronan gives one of her most transcendent performances in Nora Fingscheidt’s windswept drama, playing a woman trying to rebuild her life after returning to her childhood home in the Orkney Islands. The film, based on Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of addiction and recovery, drifts back and forth between its protagonist’s present and her past as an out-of-control alcoholic in London. It also hops along different periods in her rehabilitation, never quite following a clean and steady narrative line, which puts quite a bit of responsibility on Ronan’s performance. We chart her character’s progression through her physicality. And the spectral light in Ronan’s eyes speaks volumes; this young woman is terrified of the world around her. Maybe that’s also why the film is filled with details about the natural world, including animated sequences involving mythical sea beasts thought to reside in the waters off the Orkneys. Such legends speak to the fundamental helplessness of humans in the midst of nature, but they also hint at a fantasy of power: If another being can exert such command over our worlds, then so perhaps can we. That idea — full of tension, frustration, possibility — fuels the whole film and Ronan’s performance specifically. The Outrun is ultimately about how our search for certainty and control all too often results in the loss of what little we do have.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The Outrun.

Sleep

Sly, dark, and deviously well constructed, Jason Yu’s feature debut is a horror comedy about somnambulism that’s really more about marriage. Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) is an office worker and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) is a struggling actor, and as the couple approaches the arrival of their first child, their commitment to one another is challenged by the increasingly alarming sleepwalking condition Hyun-su develops. Soo-jin’s determination to protect her husband starts turning into an urge to protect others from him once their baby arrives, and Yu ably ramps up the dread while showing how Hyun-su’s hapless sleeping menace meets Soo-jin’s sleepless anxiousness. —Alison Willmore

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s review of Sleep.

The Wild Robot

Based on the children’s book by Peter Brown, Chris Sanders’s new animated film presents a somewhat familiar, comforting, warmhearted tale. But then you look at the movie — really look at it, as you might a painting — and a whole new world opens up. In telling the story of a relentlessly task-oriented robot (voiced brilliantly by Lupita Nyong’o) that’s wound up on the edge of a dense forest in a remote island in the middle of nowhere, Sanders creates a visual dissonance that almost subconsciously insinuates its way into our brains and feeds the central idea of the film. And it’s hypnotic. The environment and the creatures have been painted with rough brushstrokes, running counter to the polished look of modern computer-animated films. The robot, however, is all sharp angles and sleek surfaces — until she starts to change and learn about what it takes to become a mother for an orphaned gosling who is just as much of an outcast as she is. The tale of the robot becomes a deeply relatable tale of inadequacy: How far can our longing to love carry us if the world refuses to acknowledge it, and if we ourselves lack the means to express it? The film’s visual imagination, combined with Nyong’o’s vocal performance, turns a heartwarming family film into an unforgettable one. —Bilge Ebiri

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The Wild Robot and Ebiri’s interview with director Chris Sanders.

Will & Harper

A very funny movie about two comedians stuck on a road trip together that also happens to be a tender documentary portrait about the friendship between Will Ferrell and his trans best friend Harper Steele, Josh Greenbaum’s film could potentially find purchase with audiences that would otherwise avoid a movie with a subject like this. Ferrell and Steele both started at the same time on Saturday Night Live in the 1990s — one as an actor, the other as a writer — long before Steele transitioned at the age of 61. As Ferrell tells it, the Iowa-born Steele was something of a tough guy at the time, someone who loved drinking “shitty beer� and hitchhiking and road-tripping across the country. The idea for the documentary grew out of Ferrell’s desire to accompany Steele on her first trip across the country after transitioning. Greenbaum, who directed 2021’s Barb & Star Go to Vista del Mar and last year’s Strays, clearly has a feel for buddy comedies and road movies. The film’s most powerful achievement is perhaps also its most basic: the simple sight of two friends talking, openly and gently, about all the things on their minds. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Will & Harper. 

A Different Man

Aaron Schimberg’s unclassifiable conversation-starter is part noir, part sci-fi, part comedy, part drama. Sebastian Stan plays Edward Lemuel, a shy, struggling actor with a facial disfigurement whose life changes when an experimental treatment miraculously removes the tumors covering his head. Then he meets Adam Pearson’s Oswald, who has the same condition. Unlike Edward, however, Oswald is a bon vivant comfortable in his own skin — a great dancer, a karaoke master, and a ladies’ man who politely takes everything from the now handsome but increasingly surly and resentful Edward. It’s a star-making turn for Pearson, an actor with fibromatosis, whose delightful personality directly inspired Schimberg’s film. Stan, also wonderful, appears in his early scenes in an expertly made prosthetic mask; when Pearson shows up, it’s a delightful surprise not just for the characters onscreen but for the audience as well. The film essentially becomes a conversation about the portrayal of disability onscreen — a hilarious, moving, atmospheric one. —B.E.

➽  Read Alison Willmore’s review of A Different Man and Bilge Ebiri’s interview with star Adam Pearson. 

The Substance

Haters, step off — anyone who wants to complain about the blunt-force feminism of Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror movie should consider that it’s really more interested in addiction and the relationships we form to things that harm us. And there are so many things like that in The Substance, from the eponymous drug that splits aging celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) in two to the attention her new, younger self, Sue (Margaret Qualley), basks in. Fargeat’s film is brash, admirably disgusting, and totally hilarious (that shot of the little girl in the audience of the New Year’s Eve broadcast at the end!), but it’s also an emotionally raw depiction of what it’s like to be at war with yourself, borrowing from your future with binges and later, resenting the person you were the night before. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s close read of The Substance and Rachel Handler on the reaction to the divisive film at the Cannes Film Festival.

Girls Will Be Girls

A subtly powerful Indian drama that was probably the best picture I saw at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls tells what could be a simple coming-of-age story, but it’s been written and directed and acted with such feeling, such observation, that every moment pulses with life. The top student at her elite school near the Himalayas, teenage Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) is charmed by the new boy at school, a cheerful and handsome lad named Srinivas (Kesav Binoy Kiron) who just moved from Hong Kong. He starts coming over to Mira’s house, with her mom Anila’s (Kani Kusruti) gleefully conspiratorial help. But Mira also begins to suspect that her mother is showing more interest in Sri than appropriate. It’s the kind of plot turn that could make for sleazy melodrama — perhaps something from the paperback romances Anila likes to read — but Talati lets the uncertainty over these people’s intentions hang in the air. She ably juggles all this dicey subject matter, avoiding both common coming-of-age clichés and the pitfalls of cheap melodrama. There’s a delectable, pitch-perfect hesitation to the performances. Everybody seems to be treading on eggshells, because they’re all navigating feelings they’re unsure of in a setting that doesn’t allow for uncertainty, fantasy, pleasure — or even really pain. Girls Will Be Girls is a modest work, but like some of the greatest films, it comes to vivid life before our eyes. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Girls Will Be Girls. 

Matt and Mara

I didn’t click with Kazik Radwanski’s last film, Anne at 13,000 Ft., with its depiction of a young woman with an undiagnosed mental illness that struck me as a little too much like someone’s recollections of their “crazy� ex. But Matt and Mara, his new feature, manages to be a very different beast while reuniting the Canadian director with Anne star Deragh Campbell. She plays Mara, a poetry professor, while filmmaker Matt Johnson plays her college friend Matt, who’s now a successful (if also somewhat notorious) novelist. The difference, I think, is that Matt and Mara very much exists with its female lead, rather than observing her like a butterfly pinned to a corkboard, examining her restlessness in her marriage to a musician named Samir (Mounir Al Shami), her state of mind as a new mother, and her insecurities about her stalled-out writing career. In reuniting with Matt and starting an ambiguous flirtation with him, Radwanski deftly portrays someone toying with blowing up her life, all through undercurrents in delicately realistic conversations. —A.W.

My Old Ass

Megan Park’s coming-of-age film takes a magical realist premise — what if you could go back and give advice to your younger self? — and runs with it in surprisingly heartfelt ways. A terrific Maisy Stella is 18-year-old Elliott, who during her last summer at home before college unexpectedly connects with her 39-year-old self (played by Aubrey Plaza) thanks to some psychedelic mushrooms. Rather than flesh out the sci-fi potential of this premise, Park uses it to explore her young protagonist and to delve into the question of whether it’s better to avoid heartbreak when that heartbreak comes at the end of something wonderful. As a bonus, My Old Ass is set in the most idyllic lakeside Canadian community you can imagine. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of My Old Ass. 

Red Rooms 

The title of Canadian director Pascal Plante’s unnerving thriller refers to the horrific, blood-soaked dungeons where, it is alleged, a serial killer on trial (played wordlessly by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos with saucer-eyed, predatory calm) mutilated his teenage victims while livestreaming the slaughter for money. We do witness distant flashes of such a room at one point, but the idea mostly looms over the film like an unseen dimension, a psychotic alternate reality beneath and beyond the eerie, empty drabness of modern life. Plante’s interest lies not so much in the criminal or his victims but in the people obsessed with him. The film follows Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a statuesque and mostly expressionless professional model who gets in line early every night for a seat in the small courtroom in the morning. Deep into the world of the dark web, Kelly-Anne spends much of her time playing online poker with bitcoin and hacking into other people’s private lives. There is no real bloodshed in Red Rooms, but there is a kind of spiritual savagery. Is Kelly-Anne drawn to Chevalier and his alleged acts or repulsed by them? This is among the many questions that hang in the air for most of Red Rooms’s running time, and the unnerving mystery of this woman’s psyche, combined with the ease with which she moves through the shady corners of the internet, present a portrait of a very modern soul — unreadable, unstable, and unsettling. And the questions we ask of Kelly-Anne could also be asked of all us genre fiends. The expressionless, fascinated gaze at the heart of this film is ultimately not the protagonist’s but our own. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Red Rooms.

Rebel Ridge

Jeremy Saulnier is our current master of the slow-burn action movie, and Rebel Ridge might be his tightest, most characteristic work to date. It’s all about a man trying to avoid violence — and the more he avoids it, the more the viewer’s bloodlust grows. We first see former marine Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) speeding down a country road on a bicycle before the local cops knock him over with a car and detain him. The police seize a giant wad of cash from his backpack — money he’s rushing to bail out his cousin, who’s being held on a minor drug charge. It’s all quite infuriating, especially once we discover that what the cops are doing is all legal. Rebel Ridge at times seems to have been made specifically to inform the American public about the injustices of civil asset forfeiture; Terry even gets an aspiring-lawyer sidekick, Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), who works for the county clerk and conveniently explains the situation whenever context is required. Saulnier builds tension well, but he also elegantly choreographs the havoc when it does come. And anticipation leads to investment. Rebel Ridge is not even all that violent, but the limb-breaking and face-pummeling in this movie are some of the most satisfying in recent memory. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Rebel Ridge and Roxana Hadadi’s interview with filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier about the film’s ending.

My First Film (August 30)

Zia Anger’s film is a documentary and a drama that reflects on the past while re-creating it in scripted form. It’s a look back at an unfinished indie that Anger set out to make on the cheap with some friends when she was in her 20s, with Odessa Young playing the baby filmmaker and other actors portraying her cast, crew, and then-boyfriend. It’s a rueful depiction of being young and careless with yourself and with the safety and time of others, at throwing yourself into art that no one ever sees, and at thinking of a film as something you use others to make rather than as a collaboration. But the boldest thing it does is draw a connection between Anger’s failed feature and the abortion she underwent around that time, an audacious, shockingly tender linkage that highlights the nurturing aspect of the respective endings. —A.W.

Close Your Eyes 

Legendary Spanish director Victor Erice’s fourth feature is a stirring tale about memory, identity, and friendship, and it feels deeply, almost alarmingly personal. The film follows a retired director (Manolo Solo) as he searches for his actor and best friend (Jose Coronado) who walked off the set of a movie decades ago and was never seen again. It’s clear that Erice sees a lot of himself in both of these characters, each of whom has withdrawn from the world for different reasons. The film winds up as an exploration of cinema as memory and of the relative value of that memory. The final section of the picture asks, in mesmerizing and unbearably touching fashion, what really makes a life. Is it memory and identity, the cumulative power of all our experiences, the knowledge of our friends and family? Or is it simply the ability to be happy and present? Erice suggests that it is in others’ gazes that we know ourselves. That’s something a filmmaker understands. And it’s something that a filmmaker who hasn’t been able to make a film really understands. —Bilge Ebiri

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Close Your Eyes and Ebiri’s interview with director Victor Erice. 

The Killer

John Woo finally released that American remake of The Killer that’s been in the works almost since the first one premiered back in 1989. But it would be crazy to expect the 77-year-old Woo to try and make the same movie again. Luckily, he hasn’t. This new, half–gender-flipped version of The Killer, set in France and starring Nathalie Emmanuel as the expert assassin and Omar Sy as the cop obsessively pursuing her, has roughly the same plot outline as the original but a totally different mood. It skips the florid romanticism, the thick atmosphere, the grand mythmaking, opting instead for a breezy, silly modesty. It’s fun, ridiculous, and deliriously violent in its own right. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The Killer. 

Strange Darling

JT Mollner’s thriller unfolds in chapters told out of order, a device that at first feels like it’s meant to bring to mind the ’90s heyday of Pulp Fiction knockoffs but turns out to have a sly purpose to it. There’s a woman played by Willa Fitzgerald and a man played by Kyle Gallner, and while the film starts off with the former running, bloodied, from the latter, each new section makes us reevaluate the relationship between the two characters as well as who we think they are. Strange Darling is buoyed by strong performances by its lead, but what makes it such a gratifying marvel is its ingenious construction, which manages to keep you unbalanced until the very end. —Alison Willmore

Between the Temples

In prolific indie filmmaker Nathan Silver’s latest, Jason Schwartzman plays Benjamin Gottlieb, an upstate cantor who has lost his voice because he’s mired in grief. After a suicide attempt and an altercation at a bar, he’s comforted by the almost-angelic presence of Carla O’Connor (Carol Kane), who was his music teacher back in elementary school. It turns out she wants to finally have her bat mitzvah, because she never got one as a child. Ben and Carla’s growing closeness eventually poses something of a problem for just about everyone around them. This could easily become the stuff of high-concept shenanigans, but Ben’s growing bond with Carla actually serves as a way for him to flee the humiliation that seems to lurk around every corner. Pairing Schwartzman with Kane turns out to be inspired casting: Here, two iconic oddballs from different eras of American cinema suddenly find each other, and their combined chemistry sends the movie into surprising emotional directions. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Between the Temples.

Daughters

The new Netflix documentary Daughters, directed by Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, follows the organization of a father-daughter dance between inmates at a Washington, D.C., prison and their girls, who range in age from 5 to their mid-teens. This could have easily been a standard-process doc, about the logistics and bureaucracy involved in organizing something like this, and it might have been interesting as such. But Patton and Rae choose instead to focus on the indelible faces at the heart of their tale as the girls and the dads anxiously await and prepare for their big day. The accrual of human detail pays off masterfully when we get to the dance itself, especially when the girls see their fathers for the first time. It’s only in the film’s final act that we discover that Daughters has been a longitudinal documentary all along — that this dance happened in 2019 and that these girls and their fathers have done more years of living since then. Arguably, these final scenes are the most devastating because they underscore the basic truth the entire film has been building up to: Time is the most precious thing we have. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Daughters. 

Trap

It’s always nice when M. Night Shyamalan remembers to have fun. His recent career renaissance has been marked by a more playful approach to dark themes than the more serious, somber works of his early success. In Trap, he throws obsequious girl dad and occasional serial killer Josh Hartnett into a pop concert with his superfan daughter, then reveals that the concert is a huge operation designed to catch him. The concept is ridiculous, and Shyamalan knows it. He adorns the film with odd stylistic choices (close-ups addressed to the camera, in meme-friendly fashion) and wild, narratively implausible scenes. The movie is a hoot, but the director has lost none of his heart: The pop star is played by his own daughter, and in Trap’s goofily suspenseful sequences, we sense the anxieties of a man who fears he hasn’t paid enough attention to his family in his quest for success. —B.E.

 ➽ Read Alison Willmore’s review of Trap, Matt Zoller Seitz’s essay about M. Night Shyamalan’s career, and Roxana Hadadi’s close read of Josh Hartnett’s performance. 

Dìdi

Sean Wang’s directorial debut is both tender and frank about how rough it is to be 13. Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), the protagonist, spends the summer between middle and high school bombing with his crush, alienating his friends, and taking out his frustration on his immediate family members. Steeped in the online and real-world texture of the East Bay area in 2008, the film is a painfully recognizable portrayal of adolescence that’s also a gratifyingly detailed depiction of life in a majority Asian California suburb. And as Chris’s mom, a woman left to hold the household together while her husband works in Taiwan and a thwarted artist trying to keep her dreams of painting alive, Joan Chen gives one of the year’s most lovely performances. —Alison Willmore

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Didi.

Oddity

Anyone who has seen the 2020 horror film Caveat knows that director Damian McCarthy has a thing for creepy dolls. The one in his new feature, Oddity, is so outrageously disturbing — a life-size wooden mannequin with a face carved in a perpetual scream — that the sight of it is actually kind of funny. Which is by design: Oddity is as ready to make a dark joke as it is to make you jump. This chiller’s intricate construction mirrors that of its restored Irish country-house setting, weaving together a murder, revenge, a psychic sibling, a mental institution, and of course that doll, and doing so with such skill and arresting imagery that the result is as satisfying as it is scary.

Horizon: An American Saga, Part One

The first part of Kevin Costner’s sure-to-be massive western epic feels like the opening chapters of a grand novel patiently rolling into place, carefully delineating characters and offering telltale glimpses into their lives. That said, who knows when we’ll get to see the rest of it. This part of the film is rich in period detail and filled with majestic vistas that seem to match the expanse of its story. But this can be a curse, too, at least while the picture exists as just this one installment: The power of those big, sweeping, novelistic stories (think Lonesome Dove) lies in the ways we watch those characters change, in how fate brings them together and pulls them apart. Something of this size needs a shape, and right now Horizon is basically just a rising line. While the movie doesn’t entirely work on its own, what’s onscreen is mostly promising and bodes well for future installments. The stately pace never feels boring. It’s a gorgeous, sprawling, and at times moving blast of old-fashioned storytelling — even if, for now, it’s just half (or maybe a quarter) of a movie. —Bilge Ebiri

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Horizon: An American Saga, Part One.

Last Summer

No director is better suited to making an uneasy movie about an older woman and a younger man than Catherine Breillat, France’s reigning provocateuse, who with Last Summer makes a triumphant return to filmmaking after a decadelong break. Léa Drucker brings a fascinating flintiness to her character, Anne, a lawyer whose work representing young victims of sexual abuse doesn’t stop her from falling into bed with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher). Anne and Théo come together in the dreamlike bubble of summer, but the film gets more interesting when the real world intrudes on their idyll and Anne proves that, in order to protect herself, she’s capable of wielding the same language used to discredit the victims she represents. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Last Summer.

Green Border (June 21)

Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border forces us to confront raw human behavior shorn of all niceties and posturing. Her epic new film tackles the European refugee crisis from several angles as a game of uniquely cruel political football is played between Poland and Belarus with real, terrified humans — most fleeing wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa — caught in the middle. Built around exhaustive research into real-life incidents, the cruelties inflicted on people in this picture are beyond evil: starving refugees forced into bribes and robbed blind; thirsty men forced to drink broken glass; children torn from their families; sick old men beaten to a pulp; a heavily pregnant woman tossed over a fence like a sack of potatoes; the freezing and the wounded left to die in the cold. Holland is a humanist, not a sadist, so she doesn’t dwell on these actions. But she doesn’t flinch from letting us witness such horrors amid the intimate urgency of her filmmaking. Her structure replicates the process of dehumanization these people go through. Thus, the film’s form forces us to confront our own inaction. It’s an unforgettable movie in all senses of the word. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Green Border.

Janet Planet (June 21)

Annie Baker’s wondrously delicate directorial debut manages to be equal parts mysterious and relatable — a portrayal of restless adulthood as seen through the eyes of a girl on the cusp of adolescence. As Lacy, who spends the summer adrift at home after finagling a way to come back from camp early, Zoe Ziegler is an achingly accurate 11-year-old whose anxieties about the future are balanced by a beyond-her-years solemnity. But it’s Julianne Nicholson who gives a career-best performance as Lacy’s aging hippie mother, Janet, whose love for her daughter doesn’t eliminate her need to keep looking outward for meaning — a quest that leads to a string of lovers and friends coming through the western Massachusetts cabin she and Lacy share, each visitor shedding new light on the relationship between mother and daughter. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Janet Planet and Jackson McHenry’s interview with director Annie Baker.

Thelma

Writer-director Josh Margolin’s film follows a 94-year-old woman who goes on a quest to locate the crooks who scammed her out of $10,000. Somehow, it manages to be so charming and heartfelt that the laughs never feel lazy, cheap, or cruel. It’s anchored by a delightful performance from June Squibb, a marvelous actor who has never gotten a lead role like this; she turns what is otherwise a pretty simple, cute setup into something far more profound. The protagonist’s quest to find the people who did this to her becomes about more than righting a wrong or getting her money back; it’s a way to prove to everyone (and herself) that she still has agency in her life. That doesn’t stop Margolin from riffing on spy movies and action flicks. One of Thelma’s inspirations is the spectacle of Tom Cruise sprinting across the rooftops of London in Mission: Impossible — Fallout. For her, he becomes a symbol of persistence and resilience in one’s advancing years, and for us, she becomes the same. There’s a compelling universality to the film: As the world spins ever forward, we all wind up out of touch with it soon enough. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Thelma and Rachel Handler’s interview with star June Squibb.

Ghostlight

I wandered into Ghostlight early one afternoon this past January at the Sundance Film Festival. I didn’t know anything about the picture; I urge you to see it that way as well. But if you do need more information, here goes: The movie follows one traumatized family, in particular the father, Dan (Keith Kupferer), a burly, easily distracted road-crew worker with a hot temper. One day, after another one of Dan’s blowups at work, a curious woman, Rita (Dolly De Leon), beckons him into the semi-abandoned storefront where she and a ragtag group of actors are busy rehearsing a no-budget amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. He’s soon drawn to the easy camaraderie of this makeshift theater troupe and the elegant power of Shakespeare’s prose, even though he admits he doesn’t understand any of it. For much of its running time, the film only hints at what’s actually troubling Dan and his family. It’s not a secret, exactly — the clues are pretty easy to put together — but the revelation of their tragedy still hurts like a kick to the teeth. For all the muted realism of its performances and its everyday milieu, Ghostlight plays at times like a kind of spectral fantasy. Or more accurately, like one of those experiences when real life briefly feels like it has edged into a spectral fantasy. In the end, it becomes a film about the world-changing power of artistic communion, about how creativity, compassion, and forgiveness — of oneself and others — are all pit stops on the same human journey. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Ghostlight.

Robot Dreams

Pablo Berger’s animated adaptation of Sara Varon’s 2007 book, the story of a dog and its pet robot in mid-1980s New York, was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar earlier this year. But its hand-drawn, fablelike style, along with its entrancing and melancholy beauty, feels old-fashioned in a contemporary animation world largely defined by clutter and smarm. With zero dialogue, the film follows a lonely dog (known simply as Dog) who purchases a robot companion by mail. Dog assembles Robot, and the two of them proceed to spend a wonderful summer in the overcrowded, sweaty city. But then they’re suddenly separated, and their lives diverge. The always awkward Dog finds another companion while Robot has encounters with the rest of the world that are sometimes dreams, sometimes real. Though the story seems to take place over the course of one year, we see New York change around these characters as well. Watching Robot Dreams, we find ourselves reflecting on how our own lives have changed as we’ve grown: the friends we’ve left behind but haven’t forgotten, the cities that have transformed around us, the wisdom we’ve accrued, and all the ways in which we’re still slightly damaged from all that living. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Robot Dreams.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

A prequel, a revenge tale, and even something of a bildungsroman, George Miller’s prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road follows the travails of the young Furiosa (played as a child by Alyla Browne, an adult by Anya Taylor-Joy) as she’s kidnapped by a motorcycle warlord named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and later traded off to Immortan Joe (the villain of Fury Road, here played by Lachy Hulme, in slightly younger, less pustule-filled form). Until now, the characters in the Mad Max films — yes, even the children — have arrived mostly fully formed, their minds and attitudes shaped by this dead world. Here, however, we watch a bright, young innocent lose everything that has ever meant anything to her, and her heart hardens. A pall of hopelessness hangs over the movie as we absorb the lessons of the wasteland along with our heroine. But the film is also thrilling in its own right. Action sequences charge forward and build and build, casually leaving all manner of bodies in their wake. The director also indulges his fondness for yarn-spinning, as he did in his previous film, the masterful Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022). It might not be a huge hit, but it’s nice to know that, after all these years, George Miller seems determined to stay true to his mad self. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga; Ebiri’s close look at the ending; Fran Hoepfner’s chat with actor Tom Burke; and James Grebey on Dementus’s cape.

Hit Man

“How many of you really know yourselves?� Philosophy lecturer Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) posits this question early on in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. “What if your self is a construction, an illusion … a role you’ve been playing since the day you were born?� It turns out that he’s about to become a walking answer to the question, as this amiable, bird-watching Everyman pretends to be an assassin for the New Orleans police department’s sting operations. As a fake hit man, Gary is effectively playing a figure out of our collective imagination — and that liberates him. He can make up the character as he sees fit because the people he’s playing quite simply don’t exist. Hit Man works simultaneously as an indulgence in and a deconstruction of the basic transaction of stardom: It presents us with a guy we can never be, then makes us believe for a moment that we can be him, even as it tells us that such a guy doesn’t exist in the first place. If Glen Powell’s not already a star, this picture might well make him one. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Hit Man.

Kidnapped

A number of filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, have over the years attempted to adapt the remarkable true story of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish boy in Bologna who was taken from his family by papal authorities in the mid-19th century and raised as a Catholic. But it’s perhaps appropriate that the film was finally made by the legendary Italian director Marco Bellocchio, a man who has spent his entire career questioning the power of social institutions. Bellocchio is also a master of depicting the way madness functions in families as both an external and internal force. In the sweeping, melodramatic Kidnapped, he shows not just what happened to Edgar, but also the toll it took on his family. It’s a multicharacter saga that is at once thoroughly entertaining and thoroughly terrifying. —B.E.

I Saw the TV Glow

Haunting, unsettling, and so emotionally raw it feels like an open wound, Jane Schoenbrun’s film is an exploration of dysphoria, suburban isolation, and the imperfect refuge that is fandom. It’s easy to see traces of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks in The Pink Opaque, the dreamy supernatural drama that outcasts Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) fixate on and bond over in high school. But while the show’s mythology seeps into their lives and serves as a metaphor Owen steadfastly refuses to acknowledge, the most compelling moment is the one when, a little older, Owen revisits the source of his obsession and finds that it’s nowhere near as compelling as it was in his memory. Pop culture can serve as a life raft and a refuge, but Schoenbrun’s film makes it achingly clear that Owen has to take the steps necessary to save himself in the real world. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of I Saw the TV Glow; Esther Zuckerman’s interview with filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun; and Rachel Handler’s interview with Caroline Polachek about her song for the soundtrack.

Gasoline Rainbow

The latest movie from the Ross brothers is another freewheeling creation inhabiting a limbo between fiction and non, where first-time cast members play characters inspired by — but not confined to — their own lives, improvising scenes within the boundaries of a scripted scenario. In Gasoline Rainbow, the story takes the form of a road trip to the coast embarked on by a group of five longtime friends fresh out of high school, though the journey is less about the destination than it is the picaresque adventures the group experiences along the way, as the kids meet rail-hopping crust punks, nautically-inclined skateboarders, and Lord of the Rings-loving metalheads. It’s ragged and exhilarating, like taking a hit right off the feeling of being 18 and sure your true self is out there, waiting to be discovered. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Gasoline Rainbow.

Evil Does Not Exist

The quietly wandering, elliptical quality of the early scenes in Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist might feel like a departure from the Drive My Car director’s recent and best-known work. We spend time with widower Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who lives with his daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) and makes a living doing odd jobs in and around the village of Mizubiki, chopping firewood, harvesting plants, collecting water from the springs for the local ramen joint. The peaceful life of this village is interrupted with the arrival of two representatives from a talent agency that’s planning to open a “glamping� business nearby. In the film’s most bravura scene, a presentation to a group of locals devolves into an extended confrontation when the villagers begin to ask questions about a variety of concerns, most notably the placement of the site’s new septic tank, which is too small for the number of expected customers and also upstream from the town’s fresh-water source. Evil Does Not Exist rings unnervingly true in its particulars, from the bizarre bedfellows created by modern capitalism to the quiet contempt with which city folk treat poorer villagers. But Hamaguchi also doesn’t give us obvious villains, instead portraying different people from different worlds, each trying to survive in their own way. Even so, in its own discreet, modest way, the film leaves us with a haunting sense of a personal and ecological apocalypse. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Evil Does Not Exist and Rachel Handler’s dispatch from the Venice Film Festival.

The Fall Guy

David Leitch’s action-comedy mystery romance set in the world of stunt professionals is an act of pure movie love, mixing and matching genres while tossing off in-jokes and references to its illustrious (and not-so-illustrious) forebears. Ryan Gosling, whose comedic talents were criminally undervalued until last year’s runaway hit Barbie, gets to flex them again here, bringing his deadpan, affably dim charm to the role of Colt Seavers, a hot-shot stunt double for megawatt movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). After an accident seems to end his career, a forlorn Colt gets a call to come perform a stunt on the Sydney set of a new flick being directed by Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), the woman he once loved, and is sucked into a shaggy-dog missing-persons case. The stunts are spectacular and Gosling is very funny, but maybe the most surprising thing about the film is how genuinely romantic it is. Blunt and Gosling have splendid chemistry — the kind of onscreen magnetism shared by people who are not just insanely hot but also simply know how to look at each other. The film invests us in wanting Colt and Jody to get back together; we’re willing to accept any ridiculous situation so long as it reunites them. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The Fall Guy; Ebiri’s behind-the-scenes look with the stunt team; and Ebiri’s conversation with director David Leitch.

Alam

The conversations around Palestine and Israel often don’t leave much room for nuance, but Firaz Khoury’s moving coming-of-age film offers a corrective. Not everyone realizes that there are Palestinians in Israel, living in Palestinian neighborhoods, going to schools with Palestinian teachers — but they’re taught Israeli history, seen from Israel’s perspective, all under an Israeli flag (alam is an Arabic word for banner). So they learn about Israel’s battle for independence, even though for them it’s known as the Nakba — the “catastrophe,� in which their families were displaced in 1948. In Alam, a group of middle-class students wrestles with romance, authority, and political awakening in the days leading up to Israel’s Independence Day. These are kids with means and prospects, with families and teachers who want them to keep their hands clean. To them, the political (and physical) battles being waged over their homeland sometimes seem abstract, and yet they can’t help but look for ways to be involved. This is a marvelous, mesmerizing film that offers no easy answers. —B.E.

Challengers

It’s sexy, it’s sweaty, it’s mean, and it’s just so fun — Luca Guadagnino’s tennis romance is one of the year’s treats, a film that revels in the baby-movie-star qualities of leads Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor, and Zendaya, allowing them to be larger than life even as their characters act hopelessly petty. A BDSM drama as told via sporting events, Challengers manages to make tennis look hot and to make the romantic maneuvers among the three characters into athletic competitions. All that, an oomph-oomph score, and a finale that includes shots from the POV of the ball? What did we do to deserve this, and how do we do it again? —A.W.

➽ Read Angelica Jade Bastién’s review of Challengers; Matt Zoller Seitz’s review of Zendaya’s movie performance; and Joe Reid’s explanation of who won in the ending scene.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

Joanna Arnow’s feature directing debut is an unclassifiable deadpan comedy about a Brooklyn woman, Ann (played by Arnow herself), whose entire life seems to revolve around humiliation: She’s in a sub-dom relationship with an older man whose reluctant, disaffected approach to her needs might be part of their whole thing; she endures constant awkward conversations with her parents (played by the director’s own parents); she’s completely ignored at work even when she’s being given an award. There’s a surreal quality to the film, and yet it all feels so true. Arnow has captured something about the authentic and mortifying absurdity of modern life — and she’s done it in a thoroughly entertaining way. Her filmmaking style is episodic, but not in the exhausting, indulgent style of so many other plotless dramedies: Her vignettes vary from extended sequences to comically brief snippets, giving the picture a unique and irresistible cadence. —B.E.

Civil War

What makes Alex Garland’s controversial new film so diabolically clever is the way that it both revels in and abhors our fascination with the idea of America as a battlefield. The film is set in what appears to be the present, but in this version of the present a combination of strongman tactics and secessionist movements have fractured the United States into multiple armed, politically unspecified factions. Smoke rises from cities; the highways are filled with walls of wrecked cars; suicide bombers dive into a crowd lined up for water rations; death squads, snipers, and mass graves dot the countryside. How we got here, or what these people are fighting over, is mostly meaningless to the journalists covering this war, who gather in hotel bars, get drunk, and loudly yuk it up with the jacked-up bonhomie we might recognize from movies set in foreign lands like The Killing Fields, Under Fire, and Salvador. They’re mostly numb to the horrors they’re chronicling. The movie’s lack of a political point of view has received some understandable criticism, but the conceit here is to depict Americans acting the way we’ve seen people act in other international conflicts, be it Vietnam or Lebanon or the former Yugoslavia or Iraq or Gaza or … well, the list goes on. It doesn’t want to make us feel so much as it wants us to ask why we don’t feel anything. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Civil War; Matt Zoller Seitz’s interview with director Alex Garland; and Roxana Hadadi’s essay on the movie’s final shot.

In Flames

Could we call In Flames, Pakistan’s submission for last year’s Best International Film Oscar, a horror movie? How could we not? It looks at the life of a young Karachi woman whose world is upended after the death of her father: Men stare at her, attack her, obsess over her, ignore her. The prying eyes of a patriarchal society see her as both victim and prey. A brief, seemingly promising relationship ends in tragedy. She’s pursued by haunting visions as she begins to lose the line between reality and illusion. Director Zarrar Khan depicts both supernatural shocks and real-life terrors with the same jump-scare-laced bravado but does so without ever shortchanging the very real drama at the film’s heart. —B.E.

The Beast

Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi epic is Henry James by way of David Lynch, a beguiling, slippery creation that spans three time periods and settings, and that manages to constantly surprise and unsettle. As Gabrielle, Léa Seydoux is a tragic costume-drama heroine, a stalkee in a horror film, and a frustrated seeker in an aloof futurescape, and she manages to create a sense of continuity over these very different lives, into which Louis (George MacKay) inevitably appears. The Beast is wistful, scary, and unsettling, and more than anything, it’s a big swing — a movie about being afraid of vulnerability that is itself fearless. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of The Beast.

The First Omen

Directed by Arkasha Stevenson, this prequel to 1976’s The Omen is another modern horror movie that speaks to our current moment even as it tells a fantastical story rooted in the past. In this case, the year is 1971, and young novitiate Margaret Daino (Nell Tiger Free) has just arrived in a turbulent Rome to work at an orphanage. She becomes intrigued by the odd, introverted Carlita Skianna (Nicole Sorace), one of the orphans. She sees something of herself in the girl and tries to forge a bond with her. Then a rogue priest warns her that Carlita might have been bred by the church specifically to give birth to the Anti-Christ — this is, after all, an Omen movie — and our protagonist becomes determined to save the girl. The film will surely leave you with more questions than it answers, but like the best studio horror directors, Stevenson understands that we’re not here for logic. The movie is soaked in style and mood with images that are both textured and shocking and that tap into tantalizingly visceral fears. If horror is all about loss of control, about feelings of helplessness conjured in the audience to reflect the helplessness of the characters, then this is a true horror film. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The First Omen.

La Chimera

Alice Rohrwacher’s film follows Arthur Harrison (Josh O’Connor), a strange man with a strange gift for robbing graves, finding and lifting the antique knickknacks the ancient Etruscans of central Italy used to bury with their dead. A former archeologist, he seems haunted by his own exploits, and this occasionally rambling, often gorgeous film’s queasy dream logic suggests that we’re watching a man halfway between this world and the next, struggling to find his place. Rohrwacher, one of Italy’s foremost filmmakers, makes earthy movies with a dash of what we might call magical realism. The performances are naturalistic, the location shooting authentic and ground level, but the stories often hover on the edge of fantasy. The director fills the picture with folk ballads, naif art, playful asides to the camera, and bursts of sped-up slapstick, giving it all the quality of a ramshackle operetta. But O’Connor’s concave, melancholy demeanor undercuts the picture’s levity, likely by design: The more the film goes on, and the more fanciful it becomes, the more Arthur seems unable to reconcile himself to the world around him. He’s a sad, walking embodiment of the notion that those who spend their time worrying about the next life will never feel peace in this one. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of La Chimera.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Caustic and brilliant, Radu Jude’s latest is a comedy about the terrible absurdity of life under late capitalism that includes among its wide-ranging reference points classical haiku, Goethe, the German schlockmeister Uwe Boll, and a series of profane TikToks records by its main character, an overworked PA named Angela (Ilinca Manolache). Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World consists primarily of Angela’s encounters as she drives around auditioning possible subjects for a company employee safety video, a worker-blaming production made even more absurdly bleak by the fact that Angela has been putting in such long hours she’s in danger of falling asleep on the road. But woven in, brilliantly, are clips from a communist-era film about a female taxi driver, also named Angela (Dorina Lazar), whose state-sanction dramas under the Ceaușescu regime provide a counterpoint to the present day Angela’s gig economy life, until the two characters converge for the final act, which involves the shooting of the corporate production, and is one of the most blackley funny sequences you’ll see this year. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus

A few months before he died in March 2023, Ryuichi Sakamoto recorded what he suspected might be his final solo concert. It had been created across a few days out of prerecorded segments that were then assembled and streamed around the world. An expanded version of that concert now exists as a feature film directed by the late musician’s son, Neo Sora, and it’s a moving, spare, and self-reflective work. Sakamoto was a savvy and thoughtful performer, always aware of his audience and in playful conversation with them. Now, as he communes with his music, we feel like we may be intruding on a private requiem. He doesn’t seem particularly frail during this performance; the fragility lies in the music, in the vulnerability with which he plays it, and in the austere cinematic presentation. The shimmering black-and-white photography and elegant camera moves heighten the intimacy of the performance. —B.E.

➽ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus.

Dune: Part Two

If the first Dune was Timothée Chalamet’s movie, the second belongs to Zendaya, and it’s better and more emotionally accessible for it. Denis Villeneuve’s Frank Herbert adaptation continues to be a spectacular and genuinely alien epic about genetically engineered messiah figures, space witches, massive sandworms, and BDSM-inflected goth fascist planets. But it’s Zendaya’s character, the Fremen warrior Chani, who provides the film’s heart, as a fierce-hearted rebel who’s won over by Chalamet’s Paul despite knowing better, and despite being aware that he’s saying all the right things to win her community to his side for what may be his own purposes. Dune: Part Two has incredible sweep, but it also manages to have recognizable human drama, and that comes entirely from Chani’s perspective as the representative of a people whose own desires are forever subsumed by the machinations of much larger powers. —A.W.

➽ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Dune: Part Two; Matt Zoller Seitz’s behind-the-scenes look with cinematographer Greig Fraser; and Roxana Hadadi’s analysis of the ending.